Crime & Law
With Shootings and Homicides Down in Chicago, Advocates Say There’s Still Work to Be Done
Chicago is seeing a historic drop in violent crime in the first half of the year.
According to the Chicago Police Department, homicides and shootings are both down more than 30% in the first six months of the year compared to 2024.
City data also shows significant declines in other categories like carjackings, robberies and aggravated assaults.
While anti-violence advocates are pleased with the current numbers, they believe there’s still more work to be done.
Through the first half of 2025, the CPD recorded 188 homicides and 665 shootings, which mark declines of 32% and 39%, respectively. City data also shows declines in carjackings (down 51%), robberies (down 32%), aggravated assaults (down 18%) and aggravated batteries (down 9%).
“It makes me happy, but still cautiously optimistic, because it can change,” said Vaughn Bryant, executive director of the Metropolitan Peace Initiatives. “It’s unpredictable, but to know that there are 500 fewer victims that’s a good thing, in my mind.”
However, the number of criminal sexual assaults was up by less than 1% and human trafficking saw no change.
“I don’t think it’s really helpful to use the city’s homicide rate as a reflection of our success or failure at reducing gun violence, because the geography of every community is different,” said Jahmal Cole, CEO and founder of My Block, My Hood, My City. “A domestic violence dispute that ends up a homicide in Lakeview is a lot different from a drive-by shooting in East Garfield Park. So instead of tabulating all the homicides that we have, 1,200, 1,500, we need to be looking at what are people doing in these individual communities, and should those initiatives be expanded into broader strategies.”
Chicago isn’t the only city seeing these recent declines. According to a new analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice, the number of homicides in 30 cities that provided data was 17% lower when comparing the first half of 2025 to the same period in 2024, representing 327 fewer homicides in those cities.
Violence prevention leaders attribute the recent decline to several factors including significant investments, federal funding, wraparound services and outreach workers.
“We built together the largest civilian infrastructure in the United States,” said Teny Gross, CEO of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. “Now there’s, between staff and people on stipend, about 2,000 people, many of them with backgrounds involved in peace operations. There is a significant investment in civilians to do this work.”
In recent years, Chicago has received significant federal funding for violence prevention programs. Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice announced grants used to train outreach workers were terminated — close to $30 million in funding.
“While we do need to have a strategy to replenish those funds, that’s why you have to be diversified, so that you don’t have an immediate disruption,” Bryant said. “But long-term we’ll have to figure out a way to replenish the funding that we were getting.”
Cole noted the amount of money the city has spent on police settlements and how those funds could be allocated elsewhere to continue supporting violence prevention work.
In the last six months, Chicago taxpayers have spent at least $189.3 million to resolve nearly two and a half dozen lawsuits alleging police misconduct, exceeding the city’s budget for such settlements by more than $100 million, city records show.
While violence prevention numbers show progress, earlier this month a drive-by shooting in River North killed four people and left 14 wounded. On Monday, four teens were wounded in a shooting in West Garfield Park.
The “safety gap” has also narrowed, but it still remains staggering. This year, Black Chicagoans have been 19 times more likely than White Chicagoans to be the victim of a homicide.
“There’s racial and economic injustice, there’s high incarceration rates, high unemployment rates,” Cole said. “You got poor neighborhoods and you got under-resourced schools. When you have those five conditions, you get gun violence like you have.”
And despite Illinois passing the assault weapons ban in 2023, CPD officers have recovered 5,513 illegal firearms so far in 2025, an average of 32 per day.
Matt Masterson and Heather Cherone contributed to this report.
WTTW News coverage of policing and police reform is supported by The Joyce Foundation.
