By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker are increasingly pushing back with ad hominem attacks and calls of “racism” against any criticism of their failed crime policies. That’s their typical response to those that oppose the city’s loose criminal justice policies and the state’s end of cash bail starting Jan.1, 2023.
But neither politician can escape the reality that they’ve lost control over the city’s crime. One statistic that particularly captures their failure is Chicago’s homicide rate compared to that in big-city peers New York and Los Angeles.
Chicago’s homicide rate year to date in 2022 is 18.4 for every 100,000 residents. That’s five times higher than New York’s homicide rate of 3.6 per 100,000 and 2.5 times higher than LA’s 7.5 per 100,000 homicide rate.
Those numbers aren’t just a post-George Floyd, post-Covid phenomenon. About a year ago, Wirepoints looked at a study of Chicago’s homicide rate and found the city broke ranks from New York and Los Angeles’ in the 1990s.
Chicago’s murder rate never dropped to the lower levels experienced by the bigger two cities over the last two decades. Instead, it has remained distressingly high.
At the city’s current run rate, there will be more than 26 homicides per 100,000 Chicagoans by the end of 2022. While that will be down slightly vs. 2020 and 2021 (avg. 29 per 100,000), it’s still far above the 18.5 murders per 100,000 in 2019.
And while it’s true that plenty of smaller American cities fare worse on the homicide front – New Orleans takes the crown for the highest murder rate in the country – Chicago still compares poorly to its other big-city peers, including Houston and Phoenix.
Mayor Lightfoot’s “it will be the summer of joy in Chicago” comment was rightly ridiculed when she said it five months ago. It’s even less credible now with summer over.
Overall crime is up 37 percent over 2021 and 20 percent over pre-George Floyd 2019. Carjackings are set to hit nearly 2,000 this year, or one every 5 hours. And this year alone, 35 Chicago children have been murdered so far.
You’d think Lightfoot would have cleaned up her language by now, especially after the departures of Boeing, Caterpillar and Citadel. Instead, she keeps doubling down.
Take her comments this week to McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, who recently reiterated his support for Chicago but warned the company would have to reconsider its presence due to the city’s growing crime. Instead of pledging cooperation, Lightfoot took offense and complained Kempczinski “needs to educate himself” about Chicago.
Lightfoot and Pritzker’s bullying rhetoric won’t allay the fears of Chicagoans who feel endangered in their own neighborhoods. If anything, their words and actions have emboldened the city’s criminals. And if the concerns of Illinois’ state’s attorneys are anything to go by, expect the coming elimination of cash bail under the SAFE-T Act to make things even worse.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Chicago 2022 homicides will exceed 2019 baseline; McDonald’s CEO warns city’s future at stake
- McDonald’s and the Crisis of Chicago – Wirepoints in the Wall Street Journal*
- The scream and Chicago’s “Great Unraveling” – Wirepoints on The Chicago Way with John Kass
- Chicago not a “hellhole,” but the facts show it’s a living hell for far too many people
- Chicago crime statistics: Even worse than you think
Hopefully, all media will get the message, in Illinois, too.
Ted joined Tom Miller of WJPF to talk about Illinois’ highest-in-the-nation property taxes, why lawmakers don’t want to touch the tax’s cost drivers, just how much Illinoisans’ tax burden has grown over the decades, why Gov. Pritzker failed to meet his promise to reform property taxes, and more.
Ted joined Dan and Amy to talk about the free speech controversy brewing in Wilmette due to the city’s refusal to fly a religious freedom flag, the city’s left-wing excesses and the growing culture war, the latest money spent on the illegal immigrant crisis, and more.
Weekly crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department: Report through 4/14/2024.
It’s always the same with these self aggrandized liberals who escaped the “school to prison pipeline” by sympathetic admissions to the civilized establishment. Everyone else needs to re-educate themselves and overlook the self evident and deny the emperor has no clothes. No Lightfoot, you need to educate yourself on the basics of cause and effect, basic statistics, and the obvious correlations. You are simply unqualified to manage something this large.
To not recognize the problem is part of the problem.
The graph is not at all telling the truth. All 3 figures will most probably show a sharp decline end 2022. What’s the point of this story?
What is your issue with the graph?
??? The point of the story is exactly what the headline says.
Say goodbye to Big Mac, Lori. Mackie doesn’t want to end up at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He’ll be looking for a safer State
What is it about Chicago? NY is 4 times our size and LA is 2 or 3 times. Is the gang culture more firmly rooted here? No. Are weapons easier to acquire? Probably not. Is it because Chicago was and perhaps is the most segregated city in the US? Perhaps. But each wave of immigration affects all US cities eventually if not concurrently. And in Chicago, let’s be Frank, we’re not talking about German-Americans shooting Italian-Americans in the main. No, we’re talking about African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans shooting (or stabbing or assaulting) one another. The statistics bear this out. The racist… Read more »
Failed leadership is the symptom, not the cause. Chicago voters demanded progressive and equitable policies. They voted overwhelmingly for these policies and continue to do so. And now they are reaping what they’ve sowed. Voters DON’T want a strong leader who is tough on crime and business & tourist friendly. Chicago had Rahm Emmanuel who was exactly that. Voters ran him out town because he is centrist Democrat and therefore not progressive enough. Voters demanded a leader who said all the stuff Lori promised. You see, Lori’s problem, aside from her combative and incompetent demeanor, is that she isn’t progressive… Read more »
I’m sure you are right. This is what the public has voted for. How did Chicago end up with a public that consistently votes for this, while the other cities have less of this influence? Might the education system have anything to do with it?
I think the Chicago Public School System has a lot to answer for.
And as long as it is gangbangers shooting each other it doesn’t count. According to Kim they’re mutual combatants.
Is gang culture a bigger thing? Emphatically yes. Gangs are utterly rampant. The CPD solve nothing. There’s practically a sense of impunity.
And who, even a little bit, thinks that the SafeT Act is going to result in fewer murders in Chicago?
Of course it goes without saying that Kim and Lori and Governor Tax Cheat don’t work very hard to keep criminals in jail now, however even that poor performance is only likely to get worse after January.
What a mess…..
Chicago’s murder rate of 18.4 is both better and worse that it looks at first impression. The homicide rate is far too high but when you look at it in more details, some areas of the city are very safe, and even more so, some races in Chicago are really safe. Last year there were 30 white people murdered in Chicago according to the sun-times. https://graphics.suntimes.com/homicides/ Doing a back of the envelope calculation, if Chicago is 1/3rd white, with 2.75 mil residents, that’s roughly 984k whites. Let’s round up to 1M white people to make things easy. 30 white murders… Read more »
Again, very back of the envelope here, but the sun-times says “642 black victims were killed in Chicago in 2021.” Again, Chicago is 29% black, and out of 2,750,000 residents, that’s 797,500 people. The crime rate calculator https://azcalculator.com/calc/crime-rate-calculator.php shows that 642 murders out of 757,500 people is a rate of 80.5. Maybe I did some math incorrectly, I can’t be certain, maybe I’m missing something, or the Sun-times data is wrong, but if the rate really is 80 per 100k, that’s a higher murder rate than any other sovereign country in the world. This can’t be correct, this must be… Read more »
Also, isn’t the murder rate in Chicago only about 20% of the “people shot” rate?
No Debtsor, if there were no blacks in America our murder rate would be about the same as most European countries.
And you’ll never read that in the mainstream media.
Well, no, it’s not correct. And you’re cherry picking a population that’s obviously going to be higher.
Why not cherry pick the worst areas of Venezuela then tell us the murder rate. Tape off the worst area of about 800,000 then tell us the murder rate.
But, but…MeMpHiS and BalTiMOre!!!
When Dem politicians say “borders are closed, there’s no inflation, whites are killing blacks, blacks aren’t killing blacks or whites, they are reducing crime, you can afford an electric car, government will offer enough charging stations, the price of gas will keep going down, looting is bad and Biden has no cognitive issues, etc.” All lies BUT Dems are indoctrinating voters and voters are ignorant enough to believe it. They didn’t indoctrinate these people in school so they have to do it now. But, we’re not that ignorant, we get it.
Only some of us Marie. Yesterday I talked to a farmer from downstate Illinois and he thought Pritzger did a fabulous job with the COVID pandemic. Go figure. I’ve lost faith in the intelligence of a large segment of American voters.
Wolf, having faith in your fellow Illinois voters can lead down a path of misery.
These statistics further support my belief that suburbanites and tourists are increasingly avoiding Chicago. While in Tampa this week, a friend said he and his wife are planning a long weekend to celebrate an anniversary. However, because they are concerned about the crime rate and the wide dispersion of violence throughout the city, they’ve crossed Chicago off their list. How many more people are of the same mindset?
As I’ve repeated said, the conservative world regularly points to Chicago as being a crime ridden hellhole representative of ALL of the worst of blue state/blue city problems. Every conservative podcaster, news reporter, pundit, tv personality, columnist, and politician, all of them regularly mock Chicago and talk about how terrible it is. But blue state/big city folk live in their blue bubble, and are almost completely unaware of Chicago’s perception throughout most of the country. Lori is the perfect example of this mentality. Sen. Ted Cruz said that more people are shot every weekend in Chicago than were shot at… Read more »
My husband and I no longer spend his birthday weekend downtown (from the burbs) and will not until…. A volunteer org I belong to is scheduled to have its national board of directors biannual meeting in Oct in Chicago this year (in the loop). We were in Seattle in Oct 2019, which was rough enough, having to step over homeless and avoid tweakers on our walks between the hotel and the conference facility. Many of my colleagues (including those from NY) are not thrilled about having to be in downtown Chicago for a weekend – again, walking between hotel and… Read more »
Us. After 70+ years of calling Chicagoland home, we MOVED to Tampa, someplace I never thought I’d live. But I don’t fear crossing the city limits.
Good choice.
Here’s an article from Natural News about Chicago and McDonald’s
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-09-22-mcdonalds-ceo-hints-leaving-chicago-rampant-crime.html
Great article! Where is Al Capone when you need him?
To be fair, you should compare shootings and other attempted murders not just homicides. However, Chicago has world class trauma specialists with years of experience so the disparity may be even greater!
Chicago needs to be renamed Hobbesville after that famous but long dead white guy who wrote about nasty, brutish and short.
At this point I pretty much associate living in Chicago with stupidity. I expect most of the country feels the same way.
Arbuckle and Lori aren’t concerned because they don’t care. They’re both protected by a battalion of guards
New Orleans has Chicago beat in murders per capita. Hard to believe.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-orleans-becomes-murder-capital-america-overtaking-st-louis
So if those stats for New Orleans and St. Louis are comparable, Chicago is relatively safe?
I guess as safe as the Hindenburg or Titantic. LOL