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Chicago sees historic drop in violent crime during first half of 2025 [1]

['William Brangham', 'Sam Lane']

Date: 2025-07-03 18:30:10-04:00

Jeff Asher:

It's literally a billion-dollar question in terms of if you knew the amount of resources and effort that you would put into it would be tremendous.

There's a real challenge to answering the question why. We know that there aren't more police officers in the vast majority of cities nationwide compared to where we were even two or three years ago, much less five or six years ago. We know that the root causes of violence really haven't been fixed. Poverty is still around. Education in a lot of cities still struggle.

We know that the country is still awash in guns, still awash in firearms. There haven't been any tremendous changes there. We know that murder clearance rates especially have kind of bounced around, but they're still low by historical standards, even despite the drop in murder that we have seen over the last two years.

So, putting all of that together, I think the most satisfying explanations are the big national explanations. The one that pops to my mind the most is that, after COVID, we had all of this spending on social programs, a 90 percent increase in construction from local and state governments on social and neighborhood centers, a 50 percent increase in public safety spending construction, 20 percent increase in highway spending from state and local governments.

You had all of this spending, all of this hiring, all of these things that maybe weren't specifically tied to violence reduction, but that have had this kind of ancillary benefit of helping to interrupt these cycles of violence that started in 2020 and 2021 and bring violence to what could be some of the lowest levels that have ever been recorded in the country.

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[1] Url: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/chicago-sees-historic-drop-in-violent-crime-during-first-half-of-2025

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