Chicago Homicides: Why Are They Down So Much in 2025?
And why is the mayor not mentioning this in his beef with Trump?
Let me throw up the latest news hook before I jump into my longer-term trend interest:
3 Sept 2025, Washington Examiner: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blames city’s violence problem on ‘red states’
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blamed the city’s crime problem on “red states” on Tuesday, claiming it was their supposedly loose gun laws that were contributing to violence.
“Chicago will continue to have a ‘violence problem’ as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem,” Johnson posted on X on Tuesday evening. “The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana. It is up to the federal government to step up and stop interstate gun trafficking networks.”
Okay, sounds great. Let’s arrest the folks with illegal guns and gun-runners, wherever they are. Including Chicago.
Is that what’s going on in Chicago, by the way? Because I noticed a huge drop in shootings and homicides (mainly by guns) via the data site HeyJackass! in 2025.
It’s not unique to Chicago, though. I wonder what happened.
This is year-to-date for each year, to 8/31. I have been grabbing info from this site, going back to 2011… so guess what!
Let’s take a look at the long-term trend and see if we can figure out anything interesting going on.
Chicago Monthly Homicide Trend, 2011-August 2025
Let’s look at the straight time series, with a 12-month moving average to smooth out the seasonality.
You can see that pre-pandemic, there was a huge increase in homicides in Chicago in 2016. I noted that at the time:
20 March 2017: Mortality Monday: Chicago Shootings
Back then, I noted the unfamiliar situation of an entire week in March 2017 with no fatal shootings. [HeyJackass’s data did not agree with the news, but let me not dig that up now.]
One thing I tried to grab was how bad the homicide situation was in Chicago:
Those stats were a bit stale, but I noted:
The overall rate for Chicago: 2.3% of deaths were due to homicides. Contrast that to 23% of deaths being due to cancer and 17% of deaths being due to heart disease. Heck, accidental deaths were 4% of the deaths, more than homicides.
I’m not saying that homicides in Chicago are unimportant as a problem, by the way — I think many people can see why it’s a problem, especially since while murders were 2.3% of deaths in Chicago in 2006-2010 (when homicides were at historical lows for Chicago), in 2010, there were about 13,000 people [in the U.S.] who died of homicide compared to 2.5 million who died in 2010. That’s 0.52% of deaths. There was a disproportionate amount of homicides in Chicago, even before their recent increase.
If we look at the drop in homicides in 2025, it’s to a level about seen in 2012 — this is just in absolute numbers. I’m not even checking rates at this point.
Chicago Firearm-related Homicide Mortality Map
(Yay! They’re not mixing in suicide!)
The Chicago Health Atlas also has a handy table:
The worst areas:
The areas with the lowest rates:
As these stats cover 2019-2023, this is grabbing some of the worst homicide rates Chicago has seen… just recently, but not ever.
The trend was worse in the 1990s.
To be sure, some of the reduction in homicide deaths is that trauma care improved, so that gunshot victims are more likely to survive now. But that’s more of a slower-moving trend, not an over-25% drop in one year.
Going back to the Chicago Health Atlas, one can also get the time series broken out in rate by race/ethnicity:
Most of the homicides are among Non-Hispanic Blacks, and you can see the rate increased, then decreased in both waves of homicides of 2016-2017 (then reduction), and then the pandemic 2020-2021 increase and current decrease. I’m sure the precipitous 2025 drop is also coming from this population, because that’s where most of the homicides are.
Getting that rate down to 2012 levels would be a great saving of lives.
Why Isn’t Brandon Johnson Talking About This?
Basically, homicide is down all over.
I mentioned this in June:
Great News! Homicides Way Down in U.S. in 2025!
Let me step to my favorite Chicago news source, HeyJackass!, for an end-of-May snapshot:
As of early May, murders were down 31.6 percent in Baltimore, 34.5 percent in St. Louis, 36.8 percent in Cleveland, 63 percent in Denver, 30.6 percent in New Orleans, 26.8 percent in New York, and 23.7 percent in Chicago.
It’s not great that homicides are down only about 25% in Chicago, at the end of August 2025, where they’re down a much larger amount elsewhere.
Part of this is that there was a huge spike in 2020-2021, a lot of this coming from the “Defund the Police” yelling, which led to … well, perhaps, the police not doing much.
So now that the police in many/most places being told to get back to it, and even the most progressive DAs are being told to actually prosecute violent crimes, perhaps that may help get violent crime numbers, including homicides, down.
I’ll show you the Chicago Homicides one more way:
I labeled the top year for a few of the months, and I also put a border around 2025, so you can see how low it is compared to the other years.
I don’t think the guns disappeared between 2024 and 2025, not in Chicago and in the other cities where homicide has dropped so rapidly.
Cities with Top Homicide Rates: Way Down in 2025
3 Sep 2025, The Hill: Here are 10 cities with the highest murder rates
To make it easy, I’ll list the cities and focus on the numbers:
Jackson, Miss.
The capital city’s homicide rate is a stunning 77.8 per 100,000 residents according to 2024 data collected by the FBI. That’s almost 20 times the national average of about 8.2 murders per 100,000 in major cities.
City leaders told local station WLBT in May there had been 50 percent drop in homicides compared to the same period last year.
Birmingham, Ala.
The city’s homicide rate is 58.8 per 100,000, according to FBI data on 2024. The total number of murders dropped from 76 in the first half of 2024 to 37 during the same period this year, a 51 percent drop, officials told local outlet ABC 33.
St. Louis, Mo.
St. Louis, Mo. saw 54.1 homicides per 100,000 last year. But local officials reported a major drop in murders in the first three months of this year.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said homicides dropped 28 percent compared to the first quarter of last year, to the lowest level in 20 years, according to St. Louis Public Radio.
Memphis, Tenn.
With 40.6 homicides per 100,000 residents, it places fourth on this list.
….
“Two years in a row, we’ve been down almost 25 percent in homicides. That is a huge difference in our community,” Susan Deason, executive director of Memphis Allies, said last month.
Baltimore
Baltimore, which saw 34.8 homicides per 100,000 people last year, has frequently been called out by Trump, who called it a “hellhole” on Tuesday.
….
As of July 1, the city had recorded 68 homicides, which police said marked a 22 percent year-on-year decrease. They also reported a 19 percent decrease in non-fatal shootings.
Detroit
Detroit’s 31.2 homicides per 100,000 residents placed it sixth in the country. However, the 203 homicides in the Motor City last year was the lowest number since 1965, according to city data. It also marked a 19 percent decrease from 2023 and 34 percent from 2022.
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland recorded 30 homicides per 100,000 residents last year, according to federal data. City leaders recorded 46 murders in the first six months of 2025, as reported by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, compared to a total of 64 murders the year prior.
Mayor Justin Bibb (D) has touted a 46 percent drop in the homicide rate since he entered office in 2022, pointing to increasing community trust for police, the creation of a $100 million housing fund, and the redevelopment projects focused on job creation.
Louisville, Ky.
Louisville saw 21.7 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2024. Leaders say homicides and shootings are down more than 30 percent this year, according to WLKY.
Indianapolis, Ind.
Indianapolis reported 20 homicides per 100,000 in 2024, according to the FBI. The total of 173 murders that year was down significantly from 248 homicides in 2021.
Oakland, Calif.
Oakland saw 18.6 homicides per 100,000 residents last year, more than double the big city average. Leaders say violent crime is down across the board in the first half of this year, with a 21 percent decrease in murders.
Now, the various police departments and politicians (especially the ones in budget talks with state legislatures) are arguing that increased policing led to these results. That may be the case. Especially since it may be reduced policing in 2020-2021 led to increased homicide deaths in those years.
In the case of some cities, they may be returning to levels that are merely pre-pandemic (or, in the case of Chicago, pre-Black Lives Matter protests in 2016).
Other cities may be reaching levels comparable to those of 2000, which would be a boon, and likely reflects all sorts of active interventions, rather than merely the reversal of poor choices made in 2020.
But I can see why some people, like Brandon Johnson, may not want to be talking about stupid choices made in 2020.
Over the past 2-3 years my old neighborhood, Austin, has been at #1 or #2 at years end for both Shootings (non-death) and Shooting Deaths, per Hey Jackass. You can't believe the City's numbers.