Chicago reigns as country’s ‘homicide capital’ for 13th straight year

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.”

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.”

In all, 19 of the top 20 cities for total homicides in 2024 saw fewer murders than the year before.

“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.”