By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
Wirepoints has written extensively about the city’s crime problem on our Criminal Justice page. Now we’re going a step further by giving readers direct access to the data we gather and analyze.
Wirepoints’ Chicago Crime Tracker includes simplified, easy-to-read versions of the Chicago Police Department’s CompStat reports, monthly tracking of murders and other major crimes, as well as a breakdown of Chicago’s long homicide history.
Wirepoints’ Tracker page will be updated on a weekly basis and re-released each Wednesday. Our updates are dependent on the city’s updates of its own data. Accordingly, our updates may be delayed if the city is late.
We’ll also be adding new data to our page over time, like arrest rates, CTA crime data, police officer counts and neighborhood-specific stats, so check back frequently to see what’s new.
The page is designed to help Chicagoans, Illinoisans and Americans across the nation see what’s really going on in Chicago. And it will serve as a historical record as Brandon Johnson takes office and Chicago’s crime situation continues to evolve.
Check out Wirepoints Chicago Weekly Crime Tracker HERE.
Chicago’s crime crisis is devastating the city.
It’s killing hundreds of residents every year, with Chicago serving as the nation’s murder capital for 11 years running.
It’s driving companies out of the city – including big names like Citadel, Walmart and Guggenheim Partners.
And it’s robbing Chicagoans of their safety, their property, and even their lives.
Unfortunately, the true scope of Chicago crime can’t be easily understood. Shootings and homicides are reported one week only to be overridden by new shootings and homicides the next week. And the city’s own public statistics are difficult to both find and comprehend.
Even worse, politicians – along with many in the media – often excuse or downplay the city’s displays of violence. “It’s just a big city problem,” they say. Or “it’s not as bad as it was in the 90s,” ignoring that Chicago has a homicide rate five times that of New York City’s.
Crime has become the most existential issue for Chicago. Until government leaders step up and perform their number one job, namely securing public safety, expect the city to remain in chaos and the flight of residents and businesses to continue.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Mayor-elect Johnson’s ‘silly’ kids comments could embolden the criminal actions of Chicago teens: A look at the numbers
- NYC’s low homicide rate is due to the decades-old policies that Manhattan D.A. Bragg loves to hate
- Walmart’s flight from Chicago: ‘Corporate racism?’ Or crime, taxes and dysfunction?
With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
Audio and summary 
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
Here’s an article. I think she’s trying to get hired by the Cubs or Sox as a cleanup batter.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-woman-arrested-series-baseball-054221811.html
The CPD numbers are always cooked. If you want to track crime, you should be reflecting the numbers from heyjackass.com. Those numbers are accurate.
Here’s a history lesson from Old Joe.
When I grew up in Detroit we had the country’s top homicide rate under our version of Brandon Johnson (Coleman Young). Businesses and people fled until the population dipped below a million residents. Detroit isn’t even in the top 15 US cities anymore. Homicides did eventually go down because hardly anyone lives there anymore relatively speaking….
No one left to kill.
Comprehensive reporting is certainly first step. Worth noting fair amount of street-crime, vandalism, petty theft, and mugging incidents aren’t reported to CPD, given long lead-times and disinterested response when reports are initiated. Official crime report documentation is likewise often discouraged by initial responding CPD precincts, requires crime-victims to insist upon logged reports. For most people, resulting CPD response “investigations” usually futile, if initiated, and quickly curtailed. For instance, friends had direct contact with car-jacker in stolen car, who dumped contents of stolen vehicle in their presence. They took photos, brought sampling of retrieved high-end stolen items to precinct, described car… Read more »
this is the rap sheet from the teens that killed office Preston (from CBS Chicago)
https://www.scribd.com/document/644348911/Officer-Shooting-Case-File-From-Cook-Co-Court-Records#from_embed
Where did they get the guns?
Perhaps the same place they got their FOID cards…they had them didn’t they?
No, they didn’t have FOID cards or permits!!!! Where did you get that?? The whole point of this new gun legislation is to get guns off the streets and away from bad guys. I’m curious where they got the guns, because they didn’t get them legally. This is another case of new gun laws not helping at all.
Q. Your study of gun violence in Chicago found that guns were relatively scarce in the city, yet gang members were able to obtain them. What kinds of networks enable this access? Guns aren’t easy to get for people who are disqualified from purchasing them by a criminal background. That’s no doubt a good thing, but in our research, the sad mystery was that something like 85% of the murders in Chicago are committed with guns, which indicates that the most dangerous criminals do somehow have access to them. Our current project attempts to understand how criminals—and particularly gang members—are… Read more »
Q. What kinds of policies and procedures could help reduce the supply of guns to gangs in major cities in the US? Targeting these networks could be one way for the police to reduce gang members’ access to guns. Those networks facilitate gun transactions because the individuals have reason to trust each other. The people that we talked to understand that selling guns in Chicago to violent criminals may result in their being arrested or ripped off, and are therefore reluctant to sell to anyone they don’t know. In fact, in some cases they do their own background checks! However,… Read more »
Come on Dave, you know gangbangers can get anything they need on the streets. Weapons that normally cost $250 like a 9mm SCCY might be $1200 on the street. There are always ways to obtain weapons through straw buyers who go through Indiana and Wisconsin to obtain a cheaper weapon because they have clean records and backgrounds. Without holding criminals accountable the madness will continue.
Every gun has a source. Guns are the most regulated product in the United States, are covered with serial numbers and identifying markers, etc. Law enforcement and politicians claiming they don’t know where they’re coming from is a lie. Busting this lie will most likely show that more gun regulation is pointless and blaming the wrong people.
And Mayor Elect Root Causes Johnson wants to ban Shot Spotters. The Shot Spotter worked fine, the lack of police to respond was the issue. The offenders were violent offenders who largely should have been in jail rather than creating more havoc and in this case murder of a police officer. If Root Causes Johnson was sincere, this sad case provides a bright line where he should direct his resources. While increased mental health resources can only help, more police and better prosecution of repeat violent offenders should be the bookends to address the increased crime here.
If this stuff is true, this is crazy, so callous, so reckless, sociopathic. These people are feral animals, unsocialized, they’re feral, and cannot be permitted to live in normal society. They drove around late at night, like predators, looking for people to terrorize. They mugged five different people, stole a vehicle, brazenly killed an off-duty police officer and bragged about it, bragged about it, and then destroyed a vehicle by lighting on fire. The moron carried his phone on him during the entire crime spree AND ALLOWED HIS PHONE TO RECORD GPS DATA. It’s takes two seconds to turn off… Read more »
Great idea! How about citizen reports too?