Detectives and summer jobs are not responsible for Chicago's declining crime

Correcting the record on some bad mayoral talking points

Yesterday’s Sun-Times has a really encouraging article about declining rates of gun violence. Year-to-date, murders are down 25% and non-fatal shootings (i.e. attempted murders) are down 38%. And this Memorial Day weekend, often the start to a violent summer season, was one of the safest in recent memory. This is wonderful news worth celebrating.

Understandably, our mayor would like some credit. Here he is in that Sun-Times story:

Mayor Johnson gave appreciation Tuesday to the collective work done to help curb violence over the long weekend.

He credited the hiring of 200 detectives and increased clearance rates in homicides and shootings as some of the key factors for the dip in Memorial Day weekend violence.

“If you shoot someone or shoot at someone, we’re gonna hold you accountable,” Johnson said at press conference.

Johnson also touted the investment in mental health support services, youth employment and housing as ways that have effectively fought violence throughout the city.

I am thrilled that violence is declining. But the mayor’s framing is remarkably misleading,¹ and the press shouldn’t report it uncritically without providing some basic context.

Chicago hasn’t hired more detectives, and they’re not solving more shootings

Let’s start with the most obvious one: detective headcount is flat. We have very good data on this question courtesy of the Office of the Inspector General. In April 2023, the month before Johnson was inaugurated, there were 1,130 detectives on the city payroll. In April 2025, the last month for which we have data, there were 1,127.²

The city also isn’t getting any better at holding people accountable for shootings. The Sun-Times had a great article on this a few months ago. In 2022, the year before Mayor Johnson was elected, only 5.8% of shootings resulted in an arrest. In 2023, that figure was 5.5% In 2024? It had dropped to 4.2%.

Source: Alden Loury / Chicago Sun Times/WBEZ

Unfortunately, while we have decent data on homicide clearance rates, we don’t actually have good data on the rate that the city holds murderers accountable either. CPD reports clearance rates, but only a small share of those clearances actually result in arrests. CPD ‘clears’ murder cases when police have closed a case for other reasons – for example, when the State’s Attorney’s Office declines to pursue charges for lack of evidence, or when an offender is determined to have died.

You need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to really understand the Department’s actual performance on this critically important metric. But in 2024, an investigation by CBS News found that through the first 10 months of 2023, the number of murders resulting in an arrest was just 17%. That’s down from 27% in 2022.

Youth summer jobs are also not driving the crime decline

I wrote about the city’s summer jobs program a few weeks ago. It’s great, and there’s very strong evidence that it reduces violence. But between 2023 and 2024, enrollment increased by a little over 10%. It’s expected to increase by less than that again this year – in large part because the mayor has been unwilling to cut other spending to pay for it. Notably, the number of participants in the program is still below the levels achieved in 2019, when the budget was set by Rahm Emanuel.

Does Mayor Johnson think that Rahm was better at ‘investing in people’ than he is? I doubt it. Are the higher rates of summer youth employment maybe helping at the margins? Probably. It’s great that the mayor is trying to expand the program. But it stretches basic logic to claim that the youth summer jobs program is driving the lower murder rate, when last summer’s enrollment was still 15% lower than 2019 levels.

The mayor (or his comms team) seems to have hit on a strategy to claim credit for the declining violence. The idea is to point to good outcomes and tie them to sound and popular policy ideas that he floated on the campaign trail. The problem is that he’s failed to deliver on those ideas – either completely in the case of CPD detectives, or anywhere near the required magnitude in the case of Summer Youth Employment.

Violent crime is down across the country

What’s actually happening, of course, is that Chicago is benefiting from a national trend. It’s complicated, but as we get farther from the pandemic, school closures, and the unrest/police pullback in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, violence is declining everywhere. Through the first three months of this year, Chicago’s murder rate was down 16%, and the national rate had declined by 22%. We noted a version of this trend in our 2024 scoreboard: while the homicide rate fell in Chicago in 2024, it actually fell further for our big-city peers.

That’s great news! And it’s certainly the case that the mayor deserves some credit for not screwing it up.³ When he was elected, plenty of people predicted the worst. Johnson made an almost-universally well-regarded choice for his Superintendent Larry Snelling, who helped stabilize the department and led from the front at the DNC with aplomb.

The city has also played a part in some interventions that may be working across the country. Funding for community violence intervention efforts, for example, may be making a difference in these crime declines, and the mayor’s budgets have helped support the expansion of those services locally. But realistically they’re not the main driver for our good outcome here.

The bottom line

Being a big city mayor is an incredibly difficult and often thankless job. Mayors get blamed for all sorts of things they aren’t responsible for, and every one has tried to take credit for things that just happened to occur on their watch. It’s certainly true that if Chicago’s murder rate was rising in lockstep with a national trend, people would be blaming Mayor Johnson from O’Hare to Hegewisch.

But the mayor shouldn’t get to draft off a national trend by claiming credit for policies he hasn’t actually implemented. As we head towards election season, I’m sure we’ll hear these talking points again and again. The press - and voters - should hold him to a higher standard.

1. It’s also part of a pattern. Johnson trotted out the same talking points in his mid-term interview with the Tribune a couple weeks ago.

2. WGN called Johnson out for making this claim back in 2024, when the detective numbers were also flat. He seems to have just decided to power through, and hope that people will stop checking the very publicly available statistics.

3. It also wouldn’t be fair to take three months of data and criticize the mayor for slower progress than the national average. Jeff Asher’s Real Time Crime Index is an incredible tool, but it’s still an estimate. And so much of Chicago’s violence is weighted towards the summer that we need to really get into those months to understand how we’re doing.