How officials are talking about Chicago and Illinois crime data: a guide to the spin

The political messaging on Chicago crime is messy.

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have painted the Windy City as the most dangerous American city ahead of expected immigration enforcement raids and as Trump floated sending in the National Guard.

Trump called Chicago the “murder capital of the world!” in a Sept. 2 Truth Social post.^[1]

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem focused on raw homicide numbers on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Aug. 31, saying, “For 13 consecutive years, Chicago had more murders than any other American city.”

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., used a similar statistic on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” but swapped raw numbers for “murder rate” — making it inaccurate.

Chicago’s Democratic defenders say Republicans overlook crime in red states.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat and potential 2028 presidential candidate, said his state  fared better than many others on violent crime. “Notice (Trump) never talks about where the most violent crime is occurring, which is in red states,” Pritzker said^[2] Aug. 31 on “Face the Nation.” 

“Illinois is not even in the bottom half of states in terms of violent crime. But do you hear (Trump) talking about Florida, where he is now from? No, you don’t hear him talking about that, or Texas. Their violent crime rates are much worse in other places.”

It’s not unusual for politicians to choose numbers that favor their political message, and some of these statements are wrong, misleading or lack context. (We use homicide instead of murder, because it is the legal term referring to a person killing another person, including lawfully. Republicans used the more narrow term “murder,” which means an unlawful intentional killing.)

Here are the facts to help you cut through the spin.

Homicide rate vs. raw numbers result in different metrics 

A single word — rate — makes a big difference for accuracy when discussing Chicago — or any city’s — crime.

It is accurate to say Chicago has led the country’s most populous cities for sheer numbers of homicides for 13 years. But it is inaccurate that Chicago is the country’s leader for the homicide rate, the measure that is preferred by criminologists because it adjusts the count for population size, usually per 100,000 people. 

Chicago had 573 homicides in 2024, preliminary police data^[3] shows.

Chicago has reported the most homicides of all U.S. cities every year since 2012, according to FBI data crunched by Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst for AH Datalytics.

The last city to have a higher homicide count than Chicago was New York City in 2011, said John Roman, director of the University of Chicago’s Center on Public Safety and Justice.

Chicago, which has about 2.7 million residents in the city itself, excluding suburbs, is the third most populous city in the U.S., so its raw crime numbers are bound to be higher than smaller cities.

By homicide rate, Chicago does not have the most in the U.S., or the world.

Other cities, including small cities in red states^[4] not in the national political spotlight, have violent crime problems too. 

The Trace, a news website about guns, found^[5] that “half of all shootings between 2014 and 2023 occurred outside large cities, in small cities and towns of fewer than 1 million people.” The Trace used data from the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun injuries and deaths.

The Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit organization, monitors^[6] homicide rates in the U.S. and around the world. In its most recent data^[7] from 2023, more than 100 cities around the world had higher homicide rates than Chicago, including Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans; St. Louis; Baltimore; Cleveland, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

The data showed that cities including Durán and Manta in Ecuador; Nelson Mandela Bay in South Africa; Camaçari in Brazil; and Cajeme and Tijuana in Mexico topped the list.

Although the number of murders in Chicago^[8] has been dropping^[9] since 2022, the city still has a violent crime problem^[10]. The Trump White House sent us about two dozen local news reports about Chicago carjackings^[11], murders^[12] and burglaries^[13].

RELATED: How does Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate compare with other countries?^[14]

Pritzker misleads in Illinois-Florida comparison

Democratic governors, including Pritzker and Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., have tried to turn the focus away from their major cities and toward their states’ overall crime rates^[15]. Through this broad lens, which includes rural areas and all violent crimes, the home turf appears safer.

“Low-crime rural areas may ‘water down’ the effects of high-crime urban locales such that the overall state rate is low despite significant variation,” said Jacinta M. Gau, a University of Central Florida criminal justice professor. 

Pritzker referred to a U.S. News and World Report^[16] ranking of states for violent crime rates based on 2023 FBI data. From lowest violent crime rates to highest, Florida ranked No. 22, Illinois was No. 23, and Texas was No. 34. 

So Pritzker’s statement was technically accurate, because Illinois was not in the bottom half of states, though Florida came in a notch below Illinois.

Academics who study crime data warned of various pitfalls. Victims underreport crime to police^[17], and police agencies’ decisions about classifying crimes and whether to submit annual reports to the FBI can affect a state’s report.

“The unreliability of crime data makes it easy for the numbers to be run so that the result supports the narrative that is being pushed,” Gau said.

Illinois has had decades-long issues with reporting correct data to the FBI, Asher said. He said Illinois’ violent crime count does not fully report Chicago’s aggravated assaults. Florida^[18], he added, has its own data reporting issues^[19].

There are complications to remember when comparing crime rates across cities or states.

One reason not to make city comparisons is that city boundaries are arbitrary. 

“Some cities (like St. Louis) incorporate only those parts of the metro that are densest, which has the practical effect of including areas with high violence but excluding wealthier areas,” which are in St. Louis County and St. Charles County,” Roman said. In other cities, those wealthier areas are within the city boundaries. 

Comparing states avoids the boundary issue. Plus, most criminal justice law is set at the state level.

Still, the challenges of crime data mean that politicians can selectively use or criticize the data to score political points.

“Unfortunately, this is often not clear to the average person and so it can be extremely confusing and might seem like one politician is right and the other is wrong even when a discrepancy is more apples-vs.-oranges than right-vs.-wrong,” Gau said.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this article.

RELATED: Crime is underreported, but not just in Washington, D.C., where Trump claims data is inaccurate^[20]

RELATED: Gavin Newsom claps back at Southern states with homicide rate comparison. Is he right?^[21]