Update 1/3/24: San Antonio’s homicide numbers in the first graphics have been corrected.
By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
Count on hearing repeatedly this year from Chicago’s leadership that it successfully brought down the city’s murder total by 13% in 2023. Chicago finished the year with 617 homicides, down from 709 in 2022. That’s 92 fewer murders and good news.
But what you’re unlikely to hear are five additional facts that would temper any optimism gained from that first fact:
1. Murders across the country fell at record levels in 2023. Overall, homicides nationally are expected to drop 13%, about the same as in Chicago. And murders in other big homicide hotspots like Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans fell by 21 to 31%. Most big cities had bigger percentage drops than Chicago did.
Below we lay out the 2023 data for the 10 homicide hubs in 2022, those cities with the largest number of murders in the country in 2022.
2. Chicago’s 617 homicides swamp that of its two big-city peers. NYC, which has more than triple Chicago’s population, had just 386 murders in 2023. Los Angeles, with 1.2 million more people than Chicago, had just 328 murders.
Chicago’s 617 homicides led the country for the 12th straight year.
3. Chicago’s murder rate per 100,000 residents, while down slightly in 2023, was the 2nd-highest among the nation’s biggest cities. Overall, only Philadelphia had a worse murder rate than Chicago among peer cities with populations greater than 1.5 million.
And when it comes to New York City, Chicago’s murder rate remained 5 times higher. If Chicago had had the same murder rate as NYC’s, Chicago would have experienced only 121 murders in 2023, not 617.
4. Chicago’s 617 murder total in 2023 was still up 23% when compared to pre-covid, pre-George Floyd 2019’s 500 murders.
5. Despite the 13% drop in homicides, Chicago’s major crimes jumped by a total of 16% in 2023. Robberies were up 23%. Aggravated batteries, up 6%. Thefts and criminal sexual assaults were both up 3% each. And motor vehicle thefts spiked by 37% to reach a total of nearly 30,000 car thefts. And all that was after major crimes had already jumped 40% between 2022 and 2021.
Overall, 2023 major crimes hit a post-covid record of more than 77,500. That’s 55% higher compared to 2019.
Still leading
Expect all kinds of spin on Chicago’s crime numbers in 2024, especially in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention in August and elections in November.
It’s why we created the Chicago Weekly Crime Tracker so you can easily see for yourself what’s happening across the city.
Read more Wirepoints:
- Gov. Pritzker’s dishonest spin on crime
- Chicago, New Orleans were the nation’s murder capitals in 2022 – A Wirepoints survey of America’s 75 largest cities
- Criminals robbing with impunity: Time to care about who replaces Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx
- 2023 Chicago crime to hit post-covid record, up nearly 60 percent over 2019
- Chicago: Where violence and dismal education intersect
- Red states, blue cities: Who’s to blame for America’s homicide crisis – Wirepoints Special Report
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Doing this by sheer numbers is misleading. You have to use rates per 100k residents to be more accurate. Some might also figure out how many visitors are in the city to get a better picture of how many people are there. When you look at rates, Chicago is not bad compared to Memphis, New Orleans, Baltimore and Detroit, though not as good as LA and NY.
I looked into how cities count homicides a few years ago and found that New York does not count them until convictions are in. So, many cases where people were shot or stabbed or whatever and die are not counted until years later, I don’t know if they even bother to really change the statistics for say, 2010, when someone is finally convicted in 2014.
That’s not true. They count murders the same way as other cities when they occur.
Give NY a couple of years they are in the midst of a great comeback
Couldn’t pay me enough to live in any of those zities.🇺🇸🇮🇱
https://heyjackass.com/
Check your low stats. You are off by 30 or so.
Well as ole blue eyes sang “My kind of town…”
Why do the San Antonio numbers differ in the first two graphs? Looks like a mistake.
Thank you for the catch. It has been updated.
Let’s see, 617 homicides + the number of killings under the mutual combat law that should be counted as homicides = ?
Medical professionals are a lot better at saving people now than they used to be, too.
Is that supposed to make the numbers look better?
Yeah, less people die. Number of shootings per 100,000 might be a better indicator over decades.
Raw numbers of shootings are way down from the 90’s which is reflected in the lower number of deaths too.
Last night on the news they were talking about a Level 1 Trauma center I think in Miami saves a lot of shooting victim lives and it also serves as a training center for combat zones. They showed a doctor there teaching other doctors who will be deployed wherever. They showed a few victims with the face blotted out but we all know what they look like. Sad.
I’m sure something similar goes on in Chicago.
The once known as Cook County hospital, now Stroger, has been doing that for years. Training future combat medics in the ER.
Per this article, Chicago had 709 homicides in 2022 and ONLY 617 homicides in 2023. If your loved one was 616 or even 617, would you feel good about these 2023 numbers going down slightly or even more angry than you were yesterday? It figures Illinois would celebrate 617 deaths versus 709 deaths and think that’s a good thing. How sick is that?
This trend is untenable. Anyone who defends this as “progress” is a dreaming leftist apologist. It’s unpopular and unspoken, though supported by statistics … this is primarily a black problem. Follow CWB … how many black faces do you see? How many Hispanic? How many white? There’s a reason: this is a majority black problem being visited on the city. Note: most victims are black as well, though retail/burglary/robbery/carjacking crime is “equal opportunity.” A recent FBI NIBRS report on murders illustrates that black men of all ages are the most likely murder victims. And, no Mayor Johnson, a half million… Read more »
Johnson is proactively encouraging bad culture and doing his best to shift responsibility for crime to taxpayers. I can’t stress enough how wild his Black Panther fetish is. First it was Gina Davis, then Fred Hampton. Who or what is next? He’s literally riffing off of old Black Panther literature. Check out how similar his goals are!
Sorry if it’s not big enough. OCTOBER 1966 BLACK PANTHER PARTY PROGRAM 1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities. We believe that black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities. 2. We want full employment for our people. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full… Read more »
What ever you are smoking, stop it it is really fu..up your brain.
Whatever who is smoking?
Oops, I meant Angela Davis.. Autocorrect is giving me a hard time today.
Democrats have been throwing money at this problem for years. Do they even have a Plan B because Plan A is failing miserably?
Typical of communist doctrine, the process of conversion is, in essence, the solution. Nobody has ever gotten to the end and achieved true communism.
And cue the pinheaded bookworms that try and explain why you’re safer in Chicago than Flat Rock, WY because they have a population of 150 and 3 people were murdered there last year. These Dem apologists for urban genocide committed overwhelmingly by black males with their percentages are beyond tiresome.
“But it was worse in the 90’s!” is the cope we all hear from the usual suspects defending this atrocity and Black Genocide.
Yes, I’ve heard that too. I tell them that when a problem gets fixed, I expect it to stay fixed.