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What are the most common types of crimes reported in Chicago in 2025?
Executive Summary
Chicago’s most commonly reported crimes in 2025 fall into two overlapping tiers: property offenses such as theft, burglary and larceny-theft, and violent offenses led by shootings, homicides, robberies and carjackings. Official local datasets and policing reports show property crimes (notably theft) have the highest incident counts in routine CompStat snapshots, while city and independent summaries emphasize large year-over-year declines in violent crime—particularly homicides and shootings—through mid‑2025 [1] [2] [3].
1. Why “theft” tops the raw counts — a CompStat snapshot that tells a clear numeric story
The CompStat week‑level dataset provided for 2025 lists THEFT as the single most frequent reported offense, with 2,206 incidents, followed by burglary [4] and robbery [5], reflecting how day‑to‑day reporting typically produces far larger totals for larceny and theft offenses than for violent crimes [1]. This raw numeric pattern is consistent with long‑standing crime-reporting dynamics: property offenses generate high-volume incident counts because they include many low-severity calls and classified incidents, and are more likely to be reported en masse compared with lower-frequency violent incidents. CompStat figures are preliminary and subject to revision, but they are the best near‑real‑time administrative counts local police compile for operational planning [1].
2. City and Council summaries highlight sharp drops in violent crime — context and scale
Multiple municipal and national trend reports produced in mid‑2025 present a different emphasis: strong declines in violent crime, with the City of Chicago and the Council on Criminal Justice each reporting sizable year‑over‑year reductions in homicides, shootings, robberies and carjackings through the first half of 2025. The Council noted that June 2025 overall crime was lower than pre‑pandemic months and that homicide counts fell substantially from 2021 peaks, while the city’s fact sheet reported double‑digit percentage drops across multiple violent categories [6] [2]. These trend analyses are not contradictory to CompStat’s raw totals; rather, they highlight rate reductions and directional change rather than the absolute volume where theft remains numerically dominant.
3. Independent journalism corroborates the violent‑crime decline but underscores nuance
Reporting by local media using police releases and datasets found shootings and homicides were both down more than 30% through the first half of 2025, and also documented steep declines in carjackings (around 49–51%), robberies (~32%), and aggravated assaults (18%)—while sexual assault numbers remained virtually unchanged [3]. This coverage places emphasis on the public‑safety narrative of a safer summer and aligns with the city’s messaging, but it also notes that declines can concentrate in specific months and neighborhoods, so citywide percentages mask important local variation [3]. Journalistic accounts rely largely on CPD aggregate releases and CompStat feeds to tell a temporal story about improvement.
4. Long‑run context: historical crime mix still includes serious violent and property offenses
Broader reference sources summarize Chicago’s perennial crime mix as including homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny‑theft and motor vehicle theft, reflecting a multi‑decade pattern of both violent and property offenses shaping the city’s public‑safety profile [7]. Historical FBI and comparative reports noted high murder counts in recent years, though preliminary 2025 figures show substantive declines from 2024 peaks; this background frames the 2025 narrative as one of marked improvement from a recent high base rather than an unprecedented low baseline [8] [9]. The long‑run data remind readers that both violent and property crimes remain part of the city’s crime ecology, even as trends shift.
5. What to watch next — data caveats and why definitions matter
The datasets and reports analyzed here are a mix of preliminary CompStat tallies, city fact sheets and independent trend reports; each uses different update cadences and sometimes differing offense classifications. CompStat gives high‑frequency counts that show thefts as the most common individual incident type, while city and council trend reports measure percentage changes and highlight reductions in violent crimes like homicide and shootings [1] [6] [2]. Policymakers, journalists and residents should therefore read both forms of information together: absolute counts illuminate day‑to‑day operational demand, and trend analyses reveal broader directional change—both are necessary to fully understand Chicago’s 2025 crime picture [1] [3].