Adding Context to Trump’s Misleading Claims About Crime in Chicago – FactCheck.org

The Labor Day holiday became a violent weekend in the city of Chicago, as more than 50 people were shot and nine were killed from Aug. 29 to Sept. 2. Despite those grim statistics, President Donald Trump was wrong when he said on Truth Social on Sept. 2, “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

That’s not the case, experts told us, and Chicago’s overall homicide rate declined more than 30% in the first six months of this year as compared with last year.

But Chicago has topped the list of large U.S. cities for its number of murders for over a decade. After the burst of violence over the weekend, Trump was asked at a Sept. 2 press conference whether he planned to send the National Guard or other federal law enforcement purportedly to quell crime in Chicago, as he did in Washington, D.C. Trump replied, “Well, we’re going in — I didn’t say when. We’re going in.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, joined by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson at a news conference the same day, said, “There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops” in the city. Pritzker said the state would challenge Trump’s power to send troops to Chicago in court.

(On Sept. 3, Trump seemed to backpedal on sending the National Guard to Chicago, telling reporters, “So we’re making a determination now. Do we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad?”)

Here, we’ll address some of the inaccurate or misleading claims by Trump and the White House regarding the trends in violent crime in Chicago.

Highest Homicide Rates in the World

In his Truth Social posts on Sept. 2, Trump said, “Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far,” and later wrongly claimed, “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

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., previously told us about Trump’s comparison of crimes in Washington, D.C., to other cities around the world, “It’s generally inadvisable to compare crime rates between cities, especially international cities with populations many times that of DC.”

In a Sept. 2 email, Asher said, “No, Chicago is not the murder capital of the world, there are many cities with higher murder counts and rates globally.”

Experts at the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent think tank which focuses on U.S. cities, directed us to a study of “the world’s most homicidal cities in 2023” by the Igarapé Institute, an independent Brazilian think tank. That study listed cities of 250,000 inhabitants or more by highest homicide rates — the number of homicides per 100,000 people. Chicago was not among its ranking of the 50 cities in the world with the highest homicide rates.

The Igarapé Institute’s top 50 list did include U.S. cities (by highest ranking): Memphis (number 21 in world ranking); New Orleans (25); St. Louis (30); Baltimore (36); Cleveland (37); Detroit (48); and Washington, D.C. (50). The top 10 international cities are in Ecuador, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico.

Most Murders But Not Highest Rate

A week before Trump’s Truth Social claims about Chicago, the White House posted a press release that said, “For 13 consecutive years, Chicago has had the most murders of any U.S. city.” The release cited an article in the conservative Center Square about the number of murders in Chicago in 2024.

The press release also said, “For seven consecutive years, Chicago has had the highest murder rate among U.S. cities with more than one million people.”

Asher told us, “The White House is correct that Chicago has recorded the most murders in the US for 13 straight years and has had the nation’s [homicide] highest rate for any city of 1 million or more, but that’s an arbitrarily tight comparison group to make in my opinion (usually comparisons are made amongst cities of 250,000 or more).”

According to our analysis of FBI crime data, Chicago had the highest murder rate among the nine cities with a population over 1 million in 2024. But it ranked 10th among 37 cities with  population over 500,000. And it ranked 15th among 87 cities with a population over 250,000.

Chicago had a population of more than 2.7 million in 2024.

Ernesto Lopez, senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice, also said that the White House statement about Chicago’s number of homicides is accurate. “Chicago does have the highest number of homicides in our sample of 30 U.S. cities,” he told us via email. “Relying on homicide counts at the city level is misleading, however, because generally cities with more people have a higher number of homicides. Chicago does not have the highest rate of homicides. … Other major U.S. cities, such as St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, have higher homicide rates.” (Emphasis is his.)

According to CCJ data going back to 2018, Lopez said, “Chicago does have the highest number of homicides. But again, using the number of homicides as a comparison across cities is not an advisable way to examine homicide trends. Chicago does not consistently have the highest homicide rate among cities with more than 1 million people.”

Citing the CCJ criminal offense dashboard, Lopez said, “In our sample, we have homicide data for five cities with more than 1 million people — Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and San Antonio.” That data shows Philadelphia had a higher homicide rate than Chicago in the first six months of 2019, 2024 and 2025.

Examining Chicago Crime Data

Responding to an anticipated deployment of the National Guard to Chicago, the mayor told CNN on Aug. 25, “I don’t know of any cities in America that are calling for federal troops to occupy their cities. … Homicides are down nearly 32% [in Chicago]. Shootings and shooting victims are down nearly 40%. Robberies are down 35%, carjackings are down significantly. Is there more work to be done? Of course it is. Is sending military troops into cities a way to actually drive community safety? Absolutely not.”

A fact sheet issued Aug. 25 by the mayor’s office also said overall violent crime in Chicago decreased 21.6%, overall shooting incidents declined by 37.4%, and other crime statistics were also down so far this year. The city also maintains a Violence Reduction Dashboard that “shares real-time data on violence trends in Chicago.”

The White House, however, said in its Aug. 25 press release, citing a Fox News report from 2024, “Chicago has also come under scrutiny over discrepancies in its homicide data reporting.”

Asher of AH Datalytics told us, “I find the city’s violence reduction dashboard to be completely reliable, and the mayor’s claims are correct. Murder is down 31%, shootings are down 36%, and carjackings are down 50% in 2025 compared to 2024 through August per the dashboard. Chicago has also had the second fewest murders through August since 1965 this year and the fewest shooting victims in decades.”

Lopez also said the data provided by the Chicago mayor “is consistent with what we’ve found in our analysis,” citing the CCJ report on Aug. 26 titled “Crime in Chicago: What You Need to Know.”

“Chicago’s overall crime rate in June 2025 (444.8 incidents per 100,000 residents) was lower than in June of the two years immediately prior to the COVID pandemic: 12% lower than in June 2018 (503.8 per 100,000) and 8% lower than in June 2019 (483.6 per 100,000),” Lopez told us.

“Violent crime also has declined, with all categories lower in the first six months of 2025 than during the same period in 2024. The drop in homicide in Chicago during the first half of this year is about double the size of the drop in other large American cities,” Lopez said.   

“Overall, Chicago’s declines mirror patterns of reported violent crime in other large cities across the country, but the level of violent crime in the city remains substantially higher than the average in our sample, and some property crime levels are still higher than they were before the pandemic,” he also noted.

The CCJ “did not independently verify the incidents” on the mayor’s Violence Reduction Dashboard, Lopez said. “However, the seven Part I offenses we collect from the city closely align with what is ultimately reported to the FBI.” (Part 1 offenses are homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, arson and human trafficking.) “Moreover, these trends generally match other large cities, which supports the reliability of the data,” he said.

Regarding the conflicting portraits of Chicago coming from the White House and the leaders in Illinois, Lopez said, “It’s relatively easy to cherry pick data to advance a certain political narrative. For example it can be true that both crime is decreasing and that it’s too high. Just because the numbers are down doesn’t mean the numbers are good.”

“The critical question is not whether a particular approach works,” Lopez said. “It’s what are the strategies that will be most effective, meaning what will help bring crime down both in the short and long term. And what will be most cost effective, meaning both what will cost taxpayers the least and what will cause the least infringement on constitutional rights and liberties.” 

We reached out to the White House for support regarding Trump’s claim that Chicago is the “murder capital of the world,” but we did not receive a response to that question.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.