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Violent crime drops to levels not seen in a decade in Chicago during first half of 2025
Major cities across the country, including New York and Los Angeles, have seen significant dips in violent crime since the unrest of 2020, when protests, riots and looting followed the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis and the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold.
Now Chicago finds itself firmly in that group. The city is poised to close the first half of the year with its steepest statistical drop in recent memory, with fewer than 200 homicides in the first six months of a calendar year for the first time in more than a decade, according to city and county figures.
And 2025 would be the fourth year in a row that Chicago violence totals have decreased, despite President Donald Trump and others holding the city out as a national punching bag on violent crime.
Police and experts have not singled out one particular cause of the improvement. Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said his department's strategy has been to intensify efforts to tamp down hot spots.
'We've broken down certain locations where we know, number one, there's historic violence that occurs in those areas,' Snelling told the Tribune on Thursday, 'But we also look at current trends of violence in particular areas, and we focus by making sure that we're allocating resources for those locations.'
'If we're going to be serious about saving people's lives, then we need to look where people's lives are being taken,' he added.
State and local governments have sent waves of funding toward community-level violence intervention groups, including the Government Alliance for Safe Communities pledging $100 million in public funding for 2025.
The city recorded 188 homicides as of June 25, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office — a 34% decline in killings from the first six months of 2024. Through mid-month, Chicago had seen a nearly 40% decline in overall shootings, according to the Chicago Police Department.
It's the first time since 2014 that fewer than 200 killings were recorded in Chicago between January and June, data shows.
In city neighborhoods long faced with bearing the brunt of the crime problem, the feeling of change has sometimes been slow in coming.
Work has been busy of late for Jason Perry and other outreach workers who try to keep a lid on violence in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago's South Side.
Perry, 44 was out working at West 62nd and South Honore streets Wednesday night when he got a call about a triple shooting in Ogden Park that seriously wounded three men. The next day, Perry sat in the office of the violence prevention organization Integrity and Fidelity NFP while his colleagues canvassed nearby blocks, looking for information about the attack that could help prevent further violent retaliation.
They'd responded to multiple other shootings since a 32-year-old man was shot and killed on the east side of the neighborhood June 19.
'It's been kind of hectic,' Perry said. 'But prior to that, it was pretty quiet.'
The burst of activity was one of the first this year in Englewood, a neighborhood and police district with long histories of gun violence. Violent crime is down sharply in the Englewood District (7th) so far this year, with murders dropping 45% from 2024.
Andre Thomas, the CEO of Integrity and Fidelity, had been congratulating his outreach team on the statistics hours before the shooting in Ogden Park. He described listening on the phone as outreach workers talked people out of retaliating against earlier acts of violence while Perry ticked off a list of hot spots that outreach workers make sure to give special attention to in the wake of a shooting.
The district has seen 11 murders so far this year, police data shows, and Thomas said he was gratified to see lower numbers.
But Thomas said people in his line of work were always 'going to be in competition with ourselves.'
'If we got (the homicide rate) down to 10, we'd (be) trying to end next year with five,' he said. 'And the same way you get to accept credit when it's good, you have to accept (blame) when it's bad.'
As the summer continues, the question for Thomas is: 'Can we hold this trend?'
The hottest months of the year, July and August, tend to see an uptick in violence.
After the first six months of 2025, though, the city is in line to meet a goal set last year by Mayor Brandon Johnson: keep the city's yearly killing tally under 500.
Shootings, to this point in the year, are down in most neighborhoods across the city, according to CPD. The drop has been sharpest on the city's South Side, which is covered by nine patrol districts within CPD's Area 1 and Area 2.
Through mid-June, CPD recorded 87 murders and 333 overall shootings on the South Side. In 2024, there were 145 killings with 542 recorded shooting incidents, according to the department.
Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Garien Gatewood said there are a variety of reasons for the sustained drop in crime, but highlighted a deeper collaborative effort by CPD officers and leadership, city residents, community violence intervention groups and the city's business community, as well as state and county offices.
'I genuinely think it is everybody being on the same page (and) actually working together and being focused on the ultimate goal of driving safety in the city,' Gatewood said. 'There's a lot of lives that are being impacted. There's a lot of trauma there. There's a lot of communities that are grieving, and we need to be able to support them there.'
Neighborhoods that have historically felt the brunt of the city's problem with gun violence such as Englewood, North Lawndale and South Shore have seen some of the sharpest annual declines in shootings, CPD figures show.
Not all parts of the city have felt progress, though. The Harrison District (11th), which covers much of the city's West Side where the narcotics trade is most acute, has seen five more killings so far in 2025 — 17 — than it did in the first half of last year.
And despite the numbers, violence is still puncturing many families' sense of safety. Ciara Allen, 35, lives with her mom and her six children in the Ogden District (10th), south of Harrison. Their block has seen 12 reported crimes this year, city data shows. Last year, there were 18 in the same time period.
Last Saturday, Allen's 11-year-old son Izayah asked to go outside to Franklin Park while Allen did one of her daughters' hair. He'd taken a shower and left for the park, across the street in the family's North Lawndale neighborhood.
A few moments later, they heard gunshots.
According to a police report, a man had fired into a crowd at the park while Izayah was walking across the basketball court, heading toward the pool. Izayah was struck in the back, police said. Allen sighed and looked at the ceiling.
'It could have been worse,' she said.
Not quite a week after the shooting, she said Izayah was up and around, back to his video games and talking on the phone. He'd wanted to take a spin on a hoverboard, but his dad and aunt had told him not yet. He won't need physical therapy or surgery, Allen said.
But he had been set to start a summer school program Monday, to get him ready for sixth grade, and now that will have to wait, Allen said. He needed to go back to the hospital for an X-ray on the first day of the program. He can't be in water until his wound closes, so he won't be able to jump in the pool. Allen doesn't want her kids back in Franklin Park anyway.
She was worried for her kids' safety before this, she said — sitting out on the porch whenever they were outside, tracking their locations on her phone and calling when she doesn't know where they are. Now, like many others who endure violence near their homes, she is looking to move as soon as she can.
'I'm not going to sit there on that block and raise my kids,' she said. 'It's sad and it's ridiculous. He is a child.'
Ashley Perez, a victim advocate through the North Lawndale-based social service organization UCAN, was helping Allen get started on the process of moving, getting access to state funds for victims of crime and the barrage of logistics that families can face when a loved one is shot.
Still, she said that while the past few weeks have brought the typical spike in violence that comes with the summer, the level of violence has been 'nothing compared to last year' for her.
'When you're doing the work, you can tell,' she said. 'There was a time when it was nonstop shootings back to back.'
The dip in crime is not limited to gun violence. CPD figures show double-digit percentage decreases so far this year in robberies, aggravated batteries, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts.
CPD officers and detectives are busier so far this year, too. Department records show officers have effected about 17,500 arrests through mid-June — a 9% increase over 2024. Meanwhile, officers have recovered nearly 5,400 guns in 2025, keeping with long-standing monthly averages, and the department's murder clearance rate is 81% as of late June, according to a department spokesperson.
Figures provided by county officials show the population of Cook County Jail has nearly returned to levels it saw before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 5,500 people. County data, however, shows that a greater share of inmates now face weapons and violent crime charges, while fewer detainees are held for nonviolent narcotics offenses.
That shift has also helped to stanch Chicago shootings, Snelling said, adding that the working relationship between CPD and the Cook County state's attorney's office is 'excellent.'
'Am I under the belief that we should lock everyone up and throw away the key? Absolutely not,' Snelling said. 'I do believe, however, that those who go out every single day with the intent of doing harm to other human beings have to be held, especially when we know that they're more likely to commit another violent crime.'
'I believe that these crime numbers should tell you that when we are arresting these violent offenders and holding these violent offenders (in jail pending trial), it's less likely that they get the opportunity to re-offend,' he said.
