Revisiting Chicago's Crime Trends + New Podcast - Talking NIBRS With Susan Parker

Evaluating Chicago's crime trends before and after Midway Blitz

A friend sent me this tweet recently regarding Chicago’s crime trends and asked if I planned on writing about it. I wrote about Chicago a few months and hadn’t planned to revisit, but it’s also not every day that the President says something about crime trends with such testable specificity.

In the tweet, the President said (amongst other things) that Chicago has seen “Car Theft, Shootings, Robberies, Violent Crime, and everything else drop dramatically. Since the launch of the DHS operation “Midway Blitz” in Chicago only weeks ago, Shootings are down 35%, Robberies are down 41%, and Carjackings are down almost 50%.”

Part of the challenge with evaluating this statement is that there’s no specified comparison period. There is some intense seasonality to crime in Chicago as clearly seen by this Real-Time Crime Index graph of monthly violent crime in Chicago.

Chicago crime in September, October, and November is going to be lower than crime in June, July, and August. Let’s assume the President is comparing citywide crime this year to last year for an apples-to-apples comparison. Using the city’s excellent Violence Reduction Dashboard does indeed show impressive drops in nearly every category of violent crime in Chicago.

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This Week On The Jeff-alytics Podcast

New this week to the podcast: I talk with gun violence researcher and NIBRS expert Susan Parker. We try to answer every question you’ve ever had about NIBRS — what is it, how does it differ from the old system, and how will new changes impact what can be analyzed.

Check it out: Spotify, Apple, Amazon, iHeart.

Last week, I talked with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner about how his office is revolutionizing how prosecutors can use data to communicate their story.

Now, back to Chicago.

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The President's tweet accurately characterizes the change in Chicago crime this year vs last. Shooting victimizations in Chicago are down 36 percent, robberies are down 34 percent, carjackings are down 49 percent, and overall violent victimizations are down 23 percent this year through November 12th (when I started putting all of this together) compared to the same timeframe in 2024.

The city’s dashboard also makes it easy to compare the YTD percent change for various different periods. Yes, murder and violent crime are down a lot in Chicago, but they were down a lot prior to the intervention and stayed down a similar amount during. This can be clearly seen by comparing the overall YTD percent change this year to the YTD percent change before (through the end of August) and the YTD percent change for the period covering the Federal intervention (September through mid-November).

There’s very little difference between the before and after periods suggesting the intervention itself had little impact on the topline figures. Robberies and overall violent crime fell slightly faster during the 2ish months of the intervention, but not remarkably so and reflected a continuation of a trend that started in mid-2024.

Gun violence in Chicago continued more or less on the same trend after the intervention as shown in the below graphs. The top graph measures the percent change over 30 days relative to the same timeframe a year prior while the bottom graph measures the number of shooting victims rolling over 30 days.

Yes, gun violence fell in September and October relative to earlier in the summer, but it always falls in September and October. Shootings were down around 35 percent in October 2025 relative to October 2024, but they were down more than 50 percent in June 2025 compared to June 2024.

The lack of change in Chicago shootings stands in contrast to what I found in DC and Memphis. In those cities, shootings were the one area that may have been impacted (at least in the short term) by the Federal interventions though in DC at least that drop appears to have been relatively short lived.

Finally, an analysis of Chicago’s short-term crime trends must contend with the fact that reporting to 911 appears to have dropped in Chicago in the wake of the intervention. Murder and shootings likely got reported at nearly universal rates following the intervention, but a subtle change in reporting practices could very easily contribute to some decline in certain crime types.

Only about 60 percent of robberies were reported to the police between 2022 and 2024 according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. The share of other crimes like theft being reported are even lower.

There’s evidence of falling 911 calls in Chicago in September and October 2025 — especially in Hispanic areas.

The Chicago Tribune wrote a piece in early November looking at 911 calls in Chicago using data from the city’s Inspector General and found a precipitous drop in September and October. The drop was especially sharp in Hispanic neighborhoods, per the Tribune.

I took a look at the IG’s dashboard and there’s a definite drop in 911 calls citywide that appears to have been even larger in heavily Hispanic areas. The number of 911 calls dropped in every Chicago ward in September and October 2025 compared to a year ago, but they generally dropped more in wards with heavier Hispanic populations.

The change in 911 calls is especially pronounced in places such as Wards 14, 15, and 22 (84, 70 and 89 percent Hispanic respectively). 911 calls were down 5.3 percent citywide in the first 8 months of 2025 and a similar 6.1 percent in those three wards. Calls dropped 15.4 percent in September and October citywide and were down 23 percent in Wards 14, 15 and 22. Ward 22, the most heavily Hispanic ward in the city, had a 28 percent drop in 911 calls in September and October 2025 compared to 2024.

It should be noted that most of these 911 calls are not for serious criminal offenses. Nearly half of 911 dispatches this year fit in just five non-criminal categories: disturbances, parking violations, wellbeing checks, auto accidents, and burglar alarms, so dropping 911 calls is probably not a sign of dropping crime. But people who are less willing to call for police after a traffic accident are probably less likely to call police after their car was broken into.

This doesn’t mean that crime reporting was inherently suppressed in the wake of the Federal intervention, but it certainly does point to changes in reporting patterns as possibly being a contributing factor. That said, the change in 911 reporting is unlikely to impact shooting/murder counts, and I didn’t see any obvious discrepancies in crimes being reporting in more vs less Hispanic police districts.

Ultimately, what we can say is that Chicago crime was falling prior to Midway Blitz and it’s falling at roughly the same rate after. Gun violence remains a serious issue in Chicago, though there’s little evidence that the encouraging downward trend has changed all that much. The drop in 911 calls, however, is potentially a concerning sign of harm done to community trust.