Which neighborhoods in Chicago have the highest crime rates?
Executive summary
City- and third‑party reporting shows violent crime in Chicago is highly concentrated in specific community areas rather than evenly spread across the city; multiple lists and datasets repeatedly flag West Garfield Park, Englewood/West Englewood, Austin, and parts of the South Side among the highest‑risk areas (examples: Englewood and West Garfield Park appear across compilations) [1] [2] [3]. At the same time, official dashboards and recent analyses document large neighborhood disparities and also record significant citywide crime declines in 2025, meaning both persistent hot spots and improving overall trends must be weighed [4] [5] [6].
1. Crime concentrates; neighborhood names appear consistently
Local guides and data compilations repeatedly name a short list of community areas as having the highest crime rates—West Garfield Park, Englewood (often cited with West Englewood), Austin, and parts of North Lawndale and Greater Grand Crossing are named across multiple 2025 lists and analyses as among the most dangerous in Chicago [1] [7] [8] [2] [3] [9]. Those sources rely on recent crime statistics to rank community areas and emphasize that violent crime and property crime rates in these neighborhoods are well above city and national averages [2] [10].
2. Official dashboards show disparities and real‑time trends
Chicago’s Mayor’s Office Violence Reduction Dashboard and the Chicago Police CLEARMAP provide the city’s data infrastructure for tracking where shootings, homicides, and other crimes cluster, and explicitly frame the problem as a "safety gap" between community areas with the highest and lowest rates [5] [11]. These tools are the authoritative starting point for neighborhood‑level comparisons because they draw directly on CPD and partner data [5].
3. Recent citywide declines complicate simple “most dangerous” headlines
City statements and external reviews note that Chicago led U.S. cities in violent‑crime reduction during parts of 2025—an Axios analysis cited by the mayor’s office found a 22.1% drop in violent crime in the first nine months of 2025—and the administration credits community violence intervention and policing reforms for that progress [4]. The Council on Criminal Justice and other analysts document changing patterns—motor vehicle theft and aggravated assault saw meaningful declines in early 2025—so a snapshot ranking from any single year can miss improving trends [6] [4].
4. Different sources use different metrics and produce different rankings
Commercial “most dangerous neighborhood” lists (NeighborhoodScout, Neighborhood blogs, consumer security‑brand roundups) often mix violent‑crime rate, property‑crime rate, shooting counts, and per‑capita measures to produce top‑10 lists; that leads to variation in which neighborhood ranks first and how big the gap appears [10] [2] [3]. For example, one roundup reports Englewood with ~18.2 violent crimes per 1,000 residents while others highlight West Garfield Park as the most violent community area—both claims appear in the dataset you provided [3] [7].
5. Media coverage and academic work warn of reporting bias
A 2025 spatial analysis from the University of Chicago finds media coverage does not evenly reflect where crimes occur: some neighborhoods receive disproportionate attention while common offenses like theft are underreported in local news, and the relationships between environment, poverty and crime vary across neighborhoods—so public perception may diverge from raw incident maps [12]. That study argues for geographically targeted policy responses rather than one‑size‑fits‑all remedies [12].
6. What the available sources do not settle
Available sources do not mention an exhaustive, single authoritative ranked list from the Chicago Police or the Mayor’s dashboard that is formatted as “official top neighborhoods” in the way private blogs present them; rather, official tools provide dashboards and maps for users to derive neighborhood comparisons themselves [5] [11]. Also, while many commercial lists give specific per‑1,000 rates for particular neighborhoods, those numbers vary across outlets and are not uniformly traceable back to a single CPD or FBI table in the provided set [2] [3] [1].
7. Practical guidance and context for readers
If you need up‑to‑date neighborhood rankings, consult the city’s Violence Reduction Dashboard and CLEARMAP for primary data and then compare that to independent analyses [5] [11]. Treat third‑party “top 10” lists as starting points, not definitive judgments, because they use differing metrics and can lag or emphasize certain crimes [2] [3] [10]. Remember also the documented 2025 citywide declines in violent crime and targeted intervention programs—policy change and community efforts are influencing these patterns in real time [4] [6].
Limitations: this account uses the sources you provided; specific crime‑rate figures and precise rankings differ across those sources, and an official single ranked list from the City that exactly matches the third‑party lists is not present in the supplied materials [5] [2] [3].