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President Donald Trump returned to a familiar subject this week, remarking multiple times about the violence in Chicago and painting it as an unbelievable situation that needs fixing.

“Can you believe what’s happening in Chicago?” Trump said in his speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He also referred to the seven people fatally shot in the city on a single day this week, something he also did on Twitter the night before: “What is going on there – totally out of control. Chicago needs help!”

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Chicago’s top police officer responded Friday afternoon with a sharp message: We’ve already asked for your help, and we haven’t heard back.

“We’ve made requests to the White House and the Justice Department for them to support our work – from increasing federal gun prosecution to more FBI, DEA and ATF agents to more funding for mentoring, job training and more,” Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said in a statement. “The mayor made the request in person as recently as last week and we are hopeful the administration will finally respond.”

Johnson’s comment was not the first time he has responded to the president, who has frequently invoked the bloodshed in Chicago as a shorthand for rising violence in some American cities nationwide. On Twitter and in speeches and interviews, Trump has time and again brought up Chicago, which has struggled in recent years to combat a wave of bloodshed.

The city had 762 homicides last year – its deadliest single year in two decades – with more killings there than the combined death toll in New York and Los Angeles, the only two larger U.S. cities. While a number of big cities saw an uptick in homicides last year, the death toll in Chicago was so high it drove up the homicide rate for the nation’s 30 biggest cities.

Through Wednesday, the city has had 99 homicides, slightly up from the same point last year, according to the Chicago Tribune. That newspaper tracks homicides and includes killings not counted in the police department’s tally (which does not include fatal shootings by police and justified homicides, and which shows that killings were slightly down in the same window).

On Thursday night, Trump’s tweet again posited that Chicago needed help, without elaborating on what the federal government could do:

“Seven people shot and killed yesterday in Chicago. What is going on there — totally out of control. Chicago needs help!”