Defending Chicago in a recent Fox News interview, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said it was “not in the top 30” of “big cities” with the highest rates of murder. But in 2024, Chicago had the 15th highest murder rate among U.S. cities with at least 250,000 residents, according to FBI data. It ranked higher if limiting to cities with even larger populations.
Pritzker, a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2028, made that claim on Oct. 23 while being questioned about crime in Chicago by Fox News anchor Bret Baier. Crime in the city has received a lot of attention this year, as President Donald Trump falsely labeled Chicago the world’s “murder capital” and called for sending National Guard troops there over the objection of local officials.
In their sit-down interview last week, Pritzker and Baier were discussing federal immigration enforcement in Chicago when Baier switched to talking about the city’s murder rate.
“Why does Chicago have the highest murder rate of all the big cities?” Baier asked. The governor quickly responded by saying, “We are not in the top 30 in terms of our murder rate.”
He continued, “Our murder rate has been cut in half over the last four years. And every year it’s gone down by double digits.” Pritzker then started to say something about violent crime in Chicago overall when Baier interrupted to provide a visual.
“Here’s a map,” Baier said, before describing a graphic that appeared on screen. “Most populous U.S. cities, 17.47 per 100,000 population. Chicago is No. 1, over Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York and San Diego.”
But where Chicago ranks depends on the definition of a “big” city, and Fox News used a narrow one.
When we asked, Pritzker’s office did not tell us how he defined “big cities,” or determined that Chicago was not among the 30 of them with the highest murder rates. What viewers also may not have known, because neither Baier nor the graphic made it clear, is that Fox News defined “big cities” as municipalities with a population exceeding 1 million. (Chicago itself is home to roughly 2.7 million people.)
We previously analyzed 2024 FBI data for a September article about crime in Chicago and found that Chicago did have the highest murder rate last year — almost 17.5 incidents per 100,000 people — among those same nine cities. A spokesperson for Fox News told us that the network also relied on the FBI’s data for 2024.
But for our prior story, Jeff Asher, co-founder of the consulting firm AH Datalytics, which compiles an aggregation of crime data provided by law enforcement agencies across the U.S., told us that just using cities with 1 million or more residents was “an arbitrarily tight comparison group.”
When we expanded the list, Chicago ranked 10th out of 37 cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, and it ranked 15th among 87 cities with more than 250,000.
Asher told us that such comparisons are “usually” made among cities of 250,000 or more. Based on that criteria, St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore, Detroit and Cleveland topped the list, all with murder rates of between 30 and 54 per 100,000.
However, Chicago was still in the top 30 on that list, contrary to what Pritzker said.
Declining Homicide Rates
Pritzker does have a point about murders in Chicago being down significantly since 2021 — although his office did not provide evidence that the city’s “murder rate,” specifically, “has been cut in half,” as he said.
But we found some support for the claim.
Because the FBI does not have 2021 and 2025 data for Chicago, we turned to homicide figures kept by an independent think tank that tracks crime trends in a sampling of U.S. cities, the Council on Criminal Justice. A CCJ spokesperson told us that homicides and murders are closely related, although homicide includes “some non-murder cases, such as non-negligent manslaughter.” The FBI data also include murder and non-negligent manslaughter.
In late August, CCJ reported that Chicago’s homicide rate through the first six months of 2025, from January to June, was 7 incidents per 100,000 residents. That was down from 12.8 per 100,000 during the same period in 2021, for a decrease of 45% — which is approaching half.
On a calendar-year basis, CCJ’s figures from its “Year-End 2024 Update” show Chicago’s homicide rate went down from 30.1 in 2021, to 27.5 in 2022, to 23.6 in 2023 and to 21.8 in 2024. (These figures don’t support Pritzker’s claim that the rate has dropped “by double digits” each year.)
We don’t know what Chicago’s final rate will be for 2025, but the city appears to be headed for a significant drop, as the number of reported murders and homicide victimizations had declined by about 29% through Oct. 26, year over year, according to Chicago Police Department data.
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