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Fact check: How does the crime rate in Chicago compare to the national average from 2020 to 2025?
Executive Summary
From 2020 through mid-2025, available reporting indicates Chicago’s violent crime, including homicides, has generally trended downward and broadly mirrored national declines, but direct numerical comparisons to the national average are limited by gaps and scope differences in the sources. Local officials credit city initiatives for the drop, researchers frame Chicago’s changes as part of a national pattern, and data caveats—such as incomplete city reporting and differences in measurement—mean definitive year-by-year parity with the U.S. average cannot be established from the provided material [1] [2] [3].
1. Why Chicago’s story looks like the national story — researchers flag the similarity
Researchers and local reporting indicate Chicago’s decline in violent crime aligns with a broader national fall in violence between 2023 and 2025. A Council on Criminal Justice analysis cited by WBEZ reported violent crime in the first half of 2025 was lower than in the first half of 2019 and specifically placed Chicago’s homicide rate about 25% below its 2019 level, framing the city’s decline as part of a national trend rather than an isolated local phenomenon [2]. This perspective emphasizes pattern recognition across jurisdictions and suggests shared drivers or coincident timing, but it does not by itself quantify Chicago against the national per-capita average across each year from 2020–2025.
2. National FBI figures show notable declines, but local comparisons are constrained
The FBI’s annual reporting showed a 10.3% decrease in violent crime nationwide from 2023 to 2024 and a 22.7% fall in murders, indicating a marked national shift toward lower reported violence [1]. However, the same reporting and subsequent coverage flagged incomplete Chicago-specific data, making a direct year-by-year comparison to the national figures difficult with the material at hand [1]. This gap underscores an evidence problem: national aggregates can change substantially even when some large-city inputs are partial or delayed, complicating straightforward Chicago-vs.-U.S. comparisons.
3. City leaders claim local policies worked — and critics urge caution
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Police Superintendent Larry Snelling attribute much of the local decline to targeted initiatives such as a robbery task force and department strategies, asserting a causal link between city action and falling violence [3]. Experts quoted alongside city statements caution that causation is unclear without more granular, independent data and longer-term trends, warning against over-attribution to policy alone [3]. This juxtaposition highlights competing narratives: official credit-claiming versus methodological restraint urged by outside analysts.
4. Smaller, localized data illuminate but don’t replace the citywide picture
Neighborhood and suburban crime profiles included in the supplied materials—such as La Grange Park and Willow Springs—show crime rates far below the national average, offering contrast to Chicago’s more complex urban dynamics [4] [5]. A Riverdale-focused piece noted the utility of local comparative tools but did not supply a direct city-versus-national comparison for 2020–2025 [6]. These micro-level snapshots demonstrate how local variation within metropolitan areas matters, but they cannot substitute for a consistent, citywide time series needed to compare Chicago to the United States across the entire 2020–2025 span.
5. Fact-check and context: Chicago ranks high by counts but not necessarily by per-capita rate
Fact-check reporting in late 2025 reminded readers that Chicago has led the U.S. in sheer numbers of homicides for many years, but that per-capita homicide rates are not always the nation’s highest; other cities can have higher rates when population size is accounted for [7]. This distinction is crucial: total counts and rates can tell different stories, and headlines focused on raw numbers can overstate a city’s relative per-capita risk. The available materials reiterate that Chicago’s place in national rankings depends on whether one looks at counts, per-capita rates, or trend direction.
6. Policy shifts and prosecutorial actions add a contemporaneous angle
Additional reporting in 2025 on Cook County prosecutorial practices — including a push for tougher pretrial policies on certain weapons offenses — reflects concurrent shifts in criminal-justice policy that could influence recorded crime and prosecution outcomes, though the direct effect on crime rates during 2020–2025 is not quantified in the supplied analyses [8]. Coverage of these policy moves highlights how local legal and enforcement choices can alter both the measurement and experience of crime, which in turn complicates causal comparisons to national averages without controlling for policy variance.
7. Bottom line and evidence gaps: plausible parity, but not a definitive numeric comparison
The provided sources consistently indicate that Chicago’s violent crime fell in the early-to-mid 2020s and that those declines look similar to national trends, with specific claims such as a 25% decline in homicides relative to 2019 and national violent-crime drops in 2023–2024 [2] [1]. However, because the FBI data flagged incomplete Chicago reporting and because the city-versus-national per-capita series for 2020–2025 is not fully presented in these materials, a precise numeric comparison across each year cannot be conclusively derived from the available sources [1] [6]. Users seeking year-by-year rate ratios should consult the primary FBI Uniform Crime Reports/National Incident-Based Reporting System datasets and Chicago Police annual statistics for complete time-series validation.