Plenty of cities are famous for one thing or another. With Boston it is beans; Philadelphia is known for a certain cheese steak sandwich, Memphis for barbecue, Los Angeles for show business (and massive homeless encampments) and San Francisco - well, it was once known as a place for fine cuisine, but now it's notorious for poop maps.

Chicago was once known for baseball, a specific style of pizza, and its museums. Nowadays, though, Chicago has another claim to fame notoriety; it is, for the 13th year in a row, the murder capital of the United States.

For the 13th consecutive year, the city of Chicago once again reigned as the nation’s homicide capital in 2024 with 573 murders.

Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski views that as a sickness he argues has been allowed to fester for too long.

Even as overall murder rates across the country dipped, Chicago also claimed the top spot for highest murder rate per capita among big cities at 21.5 per 100,000 population, or three times the levels of Los Angeles and nearly five times of New York City.

“It means we have a real problem and we're sick,” Dabrowski told The Center Square. “Until we get serious, this murder problem is going to be a drag on the city in terms of attracting people, attracting businesses and, worse, it's going to keep chasing people away and chasing businesses away. It's something we have to get our hands around.”

Calling the homicide problem in Chicago a "real problem" is something of an understatement. This is an existential problem, causing people and businesses to head for greener pastures. The result of that, of course, would result in only three kinds of people left in the Windy City: The criminals, the politicians (and in Chicago, a Venn diagram of those two would be very nearly a circle), and the few helpless innocents who simply can't afford to get out.

Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to call this a win.

Dabrowski adds that while Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson often talks about crime being down in the city, the truth is numbers are down across the country, just not nearly as much in Chicago.

“It's true the crime is down somewhat, but it's down dramatically across the country,” he said. “It's barely down here. You've got places like Jacksonville where murders are down 50%. You've got places like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., where it's down 30 to 35%. Our murders are only down 8%. We're just part of the national wave, but we're almost not participating in that national wave.”

There are a few reasons why this is happening.

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First, some interesting numbers from the Illinois Policy Institute. An analysis of crime trends in Chicago from 2013 to 2023 done by that group revealed that from 2023 to 2023:

Violent crime was 11.5 percent higher, driven largely by carjacking and assaults.

Homicides were down 14 percent in Chicago from 2022 to 2023 but were still 45 percent higher than in 2013.

Why? The Institute points out:

Yet Chicago leaders have made efforts to reduce police resources. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s latest budget eliminated 833 street-cop vacancies, which goes against polling from the institute’s Lincoln Poll that shows 3 in 4 Chicago voters want a larger police force. Also, the Chicago Board of Education voted to remove all police officers from Chicago Public Schools, including schools that asked to keep officers.

Add this to Chicago's revolving-door justice system and entrenched progressive district attorneys, and you've got a recipe for disaster. As Ted Dabrowski points out:

“It's kind of sickening that we don't think that we need to have rule of law,” Dabrowski said. “We have a mayor that makes apologies for kids doing big crimes as they're just being kids; we've had a state's attorney that has refused to prosecute in the way that she should and we have a really low arrest rate, which is a big result of low police morale due to city officials that don't support police. It’s a broken chain of criminal justice.”

It is, in the end, up to the people of Chicago to do something about this, and somehow, in this case, "vote the bums out" just doesn't seem like a strong enough statement. The Windy City needs a political shakeup from the very highest level down to the sixth assistant dogcatchers, and that won't happen as long as Chicago voters keep voting the bums in. 

In my younger years, I visited Chicago a few times. Then - in the early '80s - it was a fun place, even for a group of big, somewhat naive Iowa farm boys. We would listen to some great music, drink a few beers, wander around, hit up White Castle (what can I say, we were young) crash in a cheap motel room, and head home in the morning. There were parts of the city that we knew to avoid - but it wasn't like what we read today.

Chicago desperately needs a reboot - as do so many of our major cities. There's a solution, right there in front of the voters, if only they figure it out.

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