Despite what President Trump said, violent crime rates in Chicago are down considerably from their post-Covid peak.
This is really Jeff Blehar’s beat, but last week in the Morning Jolt, I noted, “After a troubling spike during the pandemic and immediately after, the violent crime rate has not just returned to pre-pandemic levels, some analysts contend it is now dropping to levels lower than before the pandemic.” That was based on a midyear review of yearly and monthly rates of 13 violent, property, and drug offenses reported to police from 2018 through June 2026, in 36 large American cities. One of those cities was Chicago.
This morning, President Trump posted to Truth Social:
Chicago violence is unchecked and at record levels. It has never been worse! This weekend 41 people were shot, 3 DEAD. These numbers are becoming normalized. It is out of control! The city will die if the Federal Government, a fine tuned crime fighting machine, is not invited in, by the Mayor or Governor, to HELP. I am awaiting the call.
There is considerable evidence that violent crime rates in Chicago are going down. Last year, Chicago reported 416 murders; each year since the recent peak of 804 in 2021, the city has suffered about 100 fewer murders each year. A University of Chicago review of police data found that from January to mid-December 2025, Chicago experienced 168 fewer murders, 795 fewer non-fatal shootings, 3,181 fewer robberies, 542 fewer carjackings, and 1,794 fewer aggravated assaults that the same period a year earlier.
As of yesterday, Chicago has had 288 homicides this year; that’s actually nine more than at this point last year, so that’s a bit of bad news. However, earlier this summer, Chicago recorded its fewest homicides for any single July in more than a half century. For the past decade, the city averaged 71 homicides in that month; this year, the city saw 37.
Are those numbers still too high? Absolutely. But they represent a significant decline from the bad old days of 2020 and 2021, and we ought to recognize it. The fact that crime is going down in 36 of the country’s largest cities, and not just in the handful of cities that have had National Guard deployments, suggests that replacing Soros district attorneys with actual serious prosecutors and putting more cops on the street is a bigger factor in reducing crime than the deployment of federal resources.
Now, I am familiar with the argument that once crimes get ubiquitous, people stop reporting them to the police. That’s believable for property crimes and thefts, but less believable for murder; when people find a dead body, they tend to report it to authorities.
And it is possible that with crimes that are shocking, high profile, and violent, citizens will feel less safe even if the crime data indicate that crime, overall, is lower. When some nutjob sets some poor woman on fire on the New York City subway, a lot of people will be fearful of taking the subway. So I’ll defer to Jeff or other Chicagoans on whether the locals feel as if crime rates are considerably lower compared with a couple years ago.
But Americans deserve a serious discussion of policing and what works. Trump’s reflexive insistence that only the federal government can bring down crime in inner cities is not helpful.