2023 End-of-Year Analysis: Chicago Crime Trends

Questions? Contact Roseanna Ander

2023 has been another deeply challenging year globally, nationally, and in our home city of Chicago. While murders are down from historic highs in 2020 and 2021, we are still not achieving fair and equitable community safety for all. For city residents, safety in America is still very much a tale of two–or more–cities. For example, in 2023, the homicide rate in Chicago (one of the most segregated cities in the country) was 20 times higher for Black residents than it was for white residents.

The good news:

• Year-to-date, homicides have decreased 12%, and shootings are down 14% percent.
• Driving the decrease is a decline in homicide victimizations between ages 20 and 29, and we’ve observed this downward trend for the past few years.

There is still much work to do ahead:

• Chicago is very racially segregated, and the safety gap between Chicago’s Black and white residents persists:
  • The safety gap is shrinking from its high-water mark in 2021, where the homicide rate for Black residents was 40x that for white residents.
  • In 2023, the disparity in homicide rates between Black and white residents decreased by 50% compared to 2021. Even with this reduction, the homicide rate for Black residents was 20 times higher than for white residents.
• The neighborhoods with the highest homicide rates experience approximately 30x more homicides than the neighborhoods with the lowest rates.
• The share of homicide victims over age 30 has increased significantly since 2019, from 41% to 53%.

For more information about our recent work, read our end-of-year newsletter.