IT WAS Eddie Johnson’s first big test. Memorial Day weekend usually marks the start of the most violent period of the year, as the crime rate rises along with the temperature (see chart). Thousands of officers patrolled the city’s parks, beaches and neighbourhoods, including Mr Johnson, the boss of Chicago’s besieged police force since April, who worked a night shift. Fixed-wing aeroplanes circled the area’s expressways, which have recently seen a spike in shootings. In the run-up to the weekend Mr Johnson launched one of the biggest anti-gang raids in Chicago’s history, resulting in the arrest of 140 gang members and the seizure of numerous guns, as well as drugs apparently worth tens of thousands of dollars. Considering the steep rise in gun violence this year, the sheer size of Chicago’s territory, the complexity of its social problems, the large number of fractious gangs with ever-younger members and the recent breakdown in trust between residents and the Chicago Police Department (CPD), Mr Johnson has taken on perhaps the toughest job in law enforcement in the country. The results of the Memorial Day operations were mixed: killings were down this year, with six murders, including one of a 15-year-old girl, between Friday morning and Tuesday morning, compared with 12 last year. Shootings were higher: 63 compared with 56.

From the start of the year until mid-May, the number of murders increased by 62% to 216. Shootings also rose by 60%. Many theories compete to explain why. One is the low morale of CPD officers, many of whom feel they are unfairly vilified and “are all being grouped with Jason,” says a former cop, referring to Jason Van Dyke, a white police officer who shot a black teenager 16 times as he lay in the road in 2014. A task-force subsequently appointed by the mayor to look at race and policing concluded in April that the CPD has “no regard for the sanctity of life” when it comes to black Chicagoans.

Mr Johnson reckons that the problem is lack of confidence in the justice system. He argues that trust has broken down—between the police and the policed, between the police and an “overburdened and broken” judiciary, as well as between the officers and their leaders. In some ways, though, the CPD has suffered from an excess of trust, among officers at least. On May 31st the city paid out $2m to settle a lawsuit with two police officers who say they were targeted by colleagues and even suffered death threats after they informed on corrupt cops who ran a criminal fief in a housing complex on the South Side.