It’s news in Chicago so the Chicago papers don’t consider it “cheap” just because it’s commonplace. DC had a lot of murders in black neighborhoods too, at least in the past. Shouldn’t the Washington Post, a DC newspaper, cover those in detail? And if the time period of the article doesn’t line up and the murder rate rose later, how are those earlier black victims “cheap deaths” even by that metric?

In every circumstance, there appears to be a racist connotation to calling black murders “cheap deaths”.