There have been 1,500 shootings in Chicago this year, with some 400 in May alone, setting a new record for the 70 percent nonwhite city.

Some 66 deaths resulted from May’s shooting total, the most since May 1995, when 75 were shot dead in the city, records show.

For the first five months of this year, there have been 243 shooting deaths in the city, the most fatalities since 1999, when 248 died in the same month, according to the running total kept by the Chicago Tribune.

Typically, that newspaper dares not mention the fact that the gun violence is exclusively black and Hispanic in origin.

Shootings in the city—which is well on its way to becoming a second Detroit as increasing numbers of whites flee the nonwhite violence—have increased for the third consecutive year.

According to the Tribune, the police department which tracks shooting incidents has reported an increase of more than 50 percent so far this year.

Nearly 400 people were shot in May, bringing the total for the first five months to more than 1,500.

The May homicide numbers—the worst of any month yet this year—appear to belie police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s optimism at a slowing in the violence since a disastrous start to the year, the Tribune reported.

After just a 2.9 percent gain in homicides in April over the year-earlier period, killings jumped 40 percent in May, department data show.

The month’s toll was fueled by a Memorial Day weekend and a Mother’s Day weekend which the nonwhites used to turn into a bloody free-for-all in the city.

Six people were killed and 63 wounded over the Memorial Day weekend’s shootouts, and eight were killed and 50 wounded during the Mother’s Day weekend.

The Chicago police—also pretending that race has nothing to do with the crime wave that is enveloping the city—said in a statement that the “violence has been stoked by gang conflicts and a proliferation of guns.”

The department has blamed most of the violence on a “core group of about 1,400 people whom they have identified through the use of data analytics.”

In an official statement, Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson blamed “weak gun laws in neighboring states,”—but did not explain why the “neighboring states” did not have the same gun problem.

Johnson also blamed “an endemic gang culture that ensnares children at younger ages” and a “broken and overwhelmed judicial system”—as if the judicial system was also somehow to blame.

Johnson also went on to blame “social media” for the violence, saying that “many young people taunt each other, brag about their crimes, and dare others to confront them.”

Once again, Johnson did not explain why “social media” has not caused violent crime in white areas.

Earlier, the Chicago Tribune also revealed that the city had seen the greatest population loss of any major US city or region in 2015.

The paper reported that residents leaving the city cited the Chicago Public Schools’ financial crisis and the city’s red light camera controversy as motivating factors—but went on to admit that the “greatest concern, however, seems to be safety.”

“Despite being the nation’s third most populous city, Chicago outpaces New York City and Los Angeles in the number of homicides and shootings,” the paper said.

One of the Chicagoans who fled was Melissa Koski, who moved to Arizona in 2008, and said she left after being the victim of two crimes. One involved a break-in at her University Village neighborhood apartment while she slept, and the second involved being robbed at gunpoint near Grand and Milwaukee avenues with her mother.

“He got a whopping $40, but I still remember his smell and can feel his sweaty body wrapped around mine, with what felt like a gun pressed to my back,” she said.

Fleeing residents—and fleeing white residents in particular—mean that the city’s tax base is steadily drying up, just as happened in Detroit. The loss of residents over the last 20 years translates to about $50 billion in lost taxable income, and about $8 billion each year in lost state and local tax revenues, the Tribune pointed out.