Katie Hill And Jens Ludwig: Why Are We Seeing A Drop In Violence In Chicago?

Chicago just turned the page on a great year for public safety. But no one is really sure why. That means no one can guarantee this current progress will continue. That’s to say, with respect to our efforts to improve public safety, this is no time to take our foot off the gas.

Let’s start with the good news. Homicides were down 29% in 2025 compared with 2024. That’s 171 fewer families getting a 2 a.m. phone call that no parent should ever get, and it continues the drop in gun violence we’ve seen since the pandemic-related peak in 2021.

Why is this happening? The honest answer is: No one knows. What we do know mostly serves to rule out different candidate explanations, rather than help us pinpoint a clear cause.

For example, some wonder if the drop in homicides is actually the result of some gaming of the numbers — that homicides are, for example, being classified as something else. If true, that explanation would predict we’d see a surge in other causes of death such as suicides or accidents. But that’s not what we see in the medical examiner data.

The fact that the declines in violence we’re seeing are so sweeping also helps rule out other possible explanations. For example, we see big declines for almost every type of violent crime, which rules out explanations specific to a given crime such as a new interagency task force on carjackings or some such. We see big drops in most neighborhoods, which rules out explanations specific to any part of the city. And we see big declines in cities across the country, suggesting that what’s going on here may not be due to anything specific or unique that Chicago’s doing.

These patterns have three important implications.

First, the fact that no one knows why violence is dropping so dramatically across Chicago and the country means we can’t guarantee things won’t regress. In fact, Chicago’s homicide rate seems to show increased volatility over the last decade: Big declines are frequently followed by equally big increases. Of particular concern is the end this year of federal pandemic relief funding, which for several years has helped prop up the budgets of all American cities — the evaporation of those funds will make the task of sustaining progress only more difficult.

Second, as the city decides how to spend its increasingly scarce dollars, we need to remember that public safety is an issue that sits upstream of every other challenge Chicago is facing. Gun violence is a terrible headwind for improving education, reducing poverty, developing communities or recruiting businesses to the city. When making tough budget calls, this is not the area to cut back.

Third, we also need to work even harder to get more public safety benefit from each increasingly scarce dollar of city spending, as we argued in a series of Tribune op-eds this fall. The encouraging recent crime trends do not at all diminish the importance of that.

When we look around the country, there are large differences in crime rates, even across cities with similar levels of criminal justice spending and similar social conditions. One thing that differentiates the best-performing cities is relentless use of data, to make sure that police are focusing on the times and places where crime and gun violence are most likely to occur, to prioritize prosecutorial attention on the people driving gun violence and to make sure cases progress through the court system as quickly as possible. Cases that take forever don’t just drain public dollars; justice delayed is justice denied for both defendants and victims. 

As we also argued, most cities devote too little attention to improving neighborhood vibrancy. The data shows that neighborhoods with stores and restaurants that people want to walk to have much less crime than ones filled with vacant lots and abandoned buildings. But government bureaucracy is often a barrier to such changes. Anything Chicago can do to accelerate the progress of the “Cut the Tape” initiative would have surprisingly important (and low-cost) benefits for public safety.

2025 saw important and promising progress in violence for Chicago. We should celebrate that — but we cannot take our eye off the ball.

Even after last year’s progress, Chicago’s homicide rate is nearly 13 times London’s; our “success” would be an unprecedented emergency in the United Kingdom. Put another way, today’s homicide rate in Chicago remains higher than it was in 1930; surely no one thinks “only slightly more dangerous than the Al Capone era” should be our goal. 

It is far too soon to declare mission accomplished. 

Katie Hill is former executive director of the Crime Lab and founder of Next Hill Strategies. Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker faculty director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and author of “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.”

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