An Analysis of Chicago Crime Trends in 2025
Violent crime declined substantially in 2025 across the country, including in our home city of Chicago – which experienced 168 fewer homicides through mid-December 2025 compared to the same period last year.
At the same time the rate of violent crime, particularly homicides, remains dramatically higher in Chicago compared to what one sees in other major cities around the world like London, Paris, Berlin or Tokyo (or, for that matter, New York City and Los Angeles). And Chicago, like most U.S. cities, must figure out a solution to this problem in the face of severe budget challenges as federal pandemic relief expires and downtown recovery continues to lag after COVID.
So what should financially strained cities do on the public safety front? In some sense the only thing they can do is try to generate more public safety return on every dollar spent. And the only path towards that goal is innovation and R&D – trying new things, measuring what happens, and doing more of what helps and less of what doesn’t. That’s been the mission of the University of Chicago Crime Lab since we started 18 years ago: Serving as an R&D partner to our home city and others around the country to figure out how to do more with less to help improve the lives of as many people as possible.
We hope the enclosed end-of-year analysis is a useful contribution towards that end and serves as an example of the ways we provide real-time R&D support to cities around the country. Your support, in ways large and small, is what has allowed us to do this critical public safety work without waiting for long government and philanthropy funding cycles. This season, we humbly ask that you continue that support through a gift to the Crime Lab.