Keep Factually independent
Whether you agree or disagree with our analysis, these conversations matter for democracy. We don't take money from political groups - even a $5 donation helps us keep it that way.
Fact check: Which neighborhoods in Chicago have seen the largest decrease in crime rate from 2020 to 2025?
Executive Summary
Chicago’s available public summaries through 2024–early 2025 document citywide declines in several violent-crime categories, including homicides, shootings and many robbery measures, but the materials supplied do not provide a comprehensive, neighborhood-by-neighborhood comparison from 2020 to 2025 that would allow identification of which neighborhoods saw the largest decreases. The Chicago Police Department and the University of Chicago Crime Lab report broad downward trends and persistent geographic and racial disparities, but none of the provided items include the disaggregated, five-year neighborhood time-series needed to answer the question definitively [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Why the supplied sources can’t name “biggest winners” by neighborhood
The Chicago Police Department’s 2024 year-end release highlights declines in homicides, shootings, and robberies but summarizes outcomes at the city level rather than supplying five-year neighborhood trend tables needed to rank neighborhoods by change from 2020 to 2025 [1]. The University of Chicago Crime Lab’s end-of-year analyses similarly report percentage changes in 2024—for example, a 7.3% homicide decline and a 3.7% drop in nonfatal shootings—while stressing the continued concentration of violence in particular communities; the report does not present a neighborhood-level 2020–2025 ranking in the documentation provided [2] [3]. Consumer-facing “safest neighborhood” articles list low-crime areas but do not offer longitudinal neighborhood comparisons across the five-year window necessary for the user’s question [4] [5] [6].
2. What the available citywide trends actually show and how they matter
Taken together, the official and academic summaries indicate meaningful year-to-year declines in several violent crime categories in 2024, with the CPD reporting a 17% drop in robberies and a 33% drop in robberies with a firearm, and Crime Lab analyses confirming lower homicide counts and fewer shootings overall while noting increased lethality [1] [2] [3]. These citywide trends demonstrate that reductions occurred in aggregate, but citywide averages can mask large local variation: the Crime Lab documents stark disparities by race and place—Black residents faced much higher fatality rates and the highest-rate neighborhoods suffered dramatically more homicides than low-rate areas—which signals that aggregate improvement does not equate to uniform neighborhood improvement [3].
3. Where the gaps are: what’s missing to answer the specific question
To identify the neighborhoods with the largest decrease from 2020 to 2025 you need consistent, geocoded incident counts or rates by neighborhood area (e.g., community area or beat) for each year 2020–2025, ideally normalized by population. None of the supplied sources include that multi-year, disaggregated dataset or an analysis that ranks neighborhoods by five-year change; the CPD release is a city-level summary, the Crime Lab pieces analyze 2024 trends and disparities, and consumer “safest neighborhood” lists provide cross-sectional safety snapshots rather than multi-year trend comparisons [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. That absence prevents a fact-based neighborhood ranking from these materials alone.
4. How to get the neighborhood-level answer using trustworthy records
To produce a definitive neighborhood ranking you should consult the underlying incident-level data that the CPD and research groups use: the CPD’s publicly posted crime datasets with geolocation and the Crime Lab’s datasets or supplements that map incidents to Chicago community areas across years. The provided materials point to these sources as the logical next step but do not include them; requesting or downloading year-by-year, neighborhood-coded incident counts for 2020–2025 and calculating percent or rate changes per neighborhood would be necessary [1] [2].
5. What else the supplied analyses reveal about interpreting neighborhood trends
The supplied analyses caution that even when overall violence falls, inequality in exposure to harm can widen: the Crime Lab reports increased shooting lethality and enormous rate ratios between highest- and lowest-rate neighborhoods, indicating that observed citywide declines may not translate to consistent, equitable safety gains across neighborhoods [3]. Consumer-focused “safest neighborhood” listings further underscore that safety varies block by block and is influenced by policing, investment and community resources; therefore any neighborhood-level decline should be interpreted alongside changes in policing practices, community interventions, and demographic or economic shifts [4] [6].
6. Final assessment and recommended next steps for a definitive answer
Based on the documents provided, no authoritative claim can be made about which specific Chicago neighborhoods experienced the largest drop in crime from 2020 to 2025 because the necessary neighborhood-disaggregated, multi-year data are not present in the materials. The most efficient path to a definitive answer is to obtain the CPD’s geocoded incident dataset and the Crime Lab’s neighborhood-mapped series for 2020–2025, compute standardized rate changes, and cross-check results for reporting or classification changes across years; until that analysis is performed, any neighborhood-level ranking would be speculative relative to the supplied sources [1] [2] [3] [4].