By Sunday evening, shootings were sharply down from the year before, and fewer people had been killed. Superintendent Eddie Johnson ventured before reporters and declared: “We’re making progress. It’s not success yet, but this goes a long way.”

In those final hours, a 5-year-old girl and her 8-year-old cousin were each shot in the leg while playing with sparklers in West Englewood; an 11-year-old boy was hit in the arm by what relatives first thought was fireworks on the Near West Side; and a 15-year-old boy was shot in the chest as he was leaving a store in Auburn Gresham on the South Side.

Nearly all the shootings over the weekend were in areas where the Police Department had dispatched thousands of officers on overtime: Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, Lawndale, Grand Crossing, South Chicago, Auburn Gresham. No shooting was recorded north of Armitage Avenue.

The violence brought the number of people shot in Chicago so far this year to at least 2,021, a level not seen in the city in recent years. The total for all of last year was just over 2,900.

When Johnson appeared before reporters again Tuesday, one of the first questions was, “Superintendent, what happened?”

At first, Johnson said his department strategies “did what we anticipated they would do.” He blamed the bloody end of the weekend on “too many guns” and renewed his pitch for a bill that would lengthen prison terms for repeat gun offenders.

“This is another example of the fact that we have too many guns on the streets of Chicago and too many people willing to use them,” he said.

When pressed, Johnson acknowledged that maybe more officers should have been deployed. He promised a review.

“There’s always a possibility that we could have had more police officers out there, so we’ll take a look at it and see if that’s the case,” he said.

The Fourth of July weekend is usually among the most violent periods of the year in Chicago, and the department braced for it by putting thousands more officers on the streets and rounding up dozens of gang members.

On Friday, police arrested 88 people on felony and misdemeanor charges for narcotics- and weapons-related crimes, police said. Most of them were on the department’s “Strategic Subject List,” which includes people believed to be most prone to be involved in violence — either as an offender or victim.

As the raids were underway, some 5,000 Chicago police officers were deployed to patrol the city streets, expressways, lakefront, parks, CTA stations and tourist attractions such as Navy Pier and the Magnificent Mile. That’s several thousand more than a typical deployment.

Even with the extra patrols, five people were shot to death and 61 others were wounded between 3 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Tuesday, according to statistics kept by the Tribune. Last Fourth of July, at least 10 people were killed and 55 others were wounded, according to Tribune data.

Johnson had no answer Tuesday when asked what the department planned to do to keep violence under control the rest of the summer. There were 315 homicides in the first half of the year, a pace not seen since the late 1990s. The superintendent said it would be a challenge to have the same holiday levels of manpower on the streets for summer weekends. He declined to say why.

The surge in violence comes at a tumultuous time for the Police Department. Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Garry McCarthy, the former police superintendent, after 41/2 years in the job amid public furor after the court-ordered release of a 2014 dashboard camera video showing a white Chicago police officer shoot Laquan McDonald 16 times, killing the black teen as he walked away from police with a knife in his hand.

The case led to murder charges against the officer, Jason Van Dyke, weeks of street protests, calls for Emanuel to resign and the start of a sweeping civil rights investigation into the Police Department by the U.S. Justice Department.

In February, the Tribune reported a precipitous drop in morale among Chicago police, citing interviews with numerous officers. They told the newspaper the McDonald shooting had made them less aggressive on the street out of fear that doing even basic police work would get them into trouble. Criminals were also taking advantage of the passive approach, they said.

The Police Department on Jan. 1 also began requiring that cops fill out detailed reports every time they make a street stop as part of a new state law and a landmark agreement worked out with the American Civil Liberties Union. The change — the result of concerns over racial profiling — has not only kept officers busy with paperwork longer than before, officers said, but also increased their anxiety about being second-guessed on whom they’ve stopped.

The number of street stops has plummeted drastically, but Police Department officials have disputed any notions that officers are slowing down on the job. Officials last week, for example, cited statistics that show police officers have recovered more than 4,300 guns so far this year, up 30 percent over the same period in 2015. Gun-related arrests have also risen, the department said.

On Tuesday, Emanuel did not answer directly when asked whether the city can afford to continue paying large amounts of overtime to beef up the police presence on Chicago streets.

And while he defended the department’s focus on a small group of offenders who account for a disproportionate amount of crime, the mayor stopped short of saying the strategy was successful over the July Fourth weekend.

“Having a strong police presence is important, and without a doubt, getting repeat gun offenders off the street has an impact,” Emanuel said.

“It was the right thing to do so people could enjoy not just Fourth of July, but their family … whether it’s at a park or on the front stoop,” the mayor later said of the department’s focus on the small group of offenders.

Chicago Tribune’s John Byrne contributed.

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