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.
President Donald Trump inaccurately claimed that the murder rate in Washington, D.C., “reached the highest rate probably ever” in 2023, and he ignored a decline in murders since then to justify a federal takeover of the city’s law enforcement.
President Donald Trump recently boasted that the nation’s murder rate has “plummeted by 28%” since he took office. Data supplied by local police departments do show the nation’s murder rate is dropping, as it has been for several years. Notably, Trump now seems comfortable with crime data that he criticized repeatedly during the campaign as “fake news.”