Chicago is clearing more cases by giving up more often
An exercise in misleading statistics
Last month, the Mayor’s Office took a victory lap to tout the substantial improvements Chicago has made in public safety over the last few years. That progress matters, and it makes sense that the Mayor would like a share of the credit. It’s certainly the case that if violence had been rising over the last few years, his opponents would be climbing over themselves to cast blame.
But while Chicago’s 2025 homicide drop was real, a number of the other claims made by the Mayor’s Office are pretty misleading. In particular, Chicago has only hired a fraction of the detectives that the Mayor’s office has claimed credit for. And the improvements in homicide clearance rates that Johnson has touted are mostly a mirage.
The Mayor says CPD hired 200 detectives and is clearing more murders
Mayor Johnson rolled out a broad-based public safety strategy during his first year in office. There are a number of pieces to that strategy, including an effort to target surge city resources to high violence neighborhoods, increase investment in Community Violence Intervention, and make some operational changes to the Bureau of Detectives.
Some of these choices are quite good. Generally speaking, there is strong evidence for some Community Violence Intervention efforts, and the reforms to the Bureau of Detectives are based on a really solid 2019 report from some well-respected policing organizations. We’ll have more on both of those topics in the coming weeks.
But the most eye-catching claim that the Mayor has trotted out recently dates back to a campaign promise Johnson made on the trail in 2023: that he would train and promote 200 new detectives. On a number of occasions since, the Mayor has claimed that he’s done so – and that has helped CPD improve the rate at which it clears murders. We’ve discussed this before, in May of 2025. But the claims have continued. Here are a few examples:
August 2025: “To improve police clearance rates, Mayor Johnson added detectives and restructured the detectives bureau at the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to more efficiently allocate resources. This work has resulted in a citywide homicide clearance rate of 77.4%, the highest in more than a decade.”
May 2026: “Mayor Johnson also exceeded his commitment to hire 200 detectives, helping the Chicago Police Department modernize investigative operations. CPD reached 77% homicide clearance rate—its highest level in decades.”
To be clear, this is a very good goal. Hiring more detectives and solving more homicides would likely increase the deterrence impact of our police (would-be offenders are much more likely to be deterred by the *likelihood* of punishment rather than the *severity* of the outcome). It’d also help break the cycle of retaliatory killings that contribute to violence in Chicago. Clearances would also provide closure to the families of victims who deserve some measure of resolution.
Unfortunately, it’s not really happening.
Chicago has not hired 200 more detectives
According to the Office of the Inspector General, in April 2023, the month before Johnson was inaugurated, CPD employed 1,130 detectives. In May 2026, there were 1,173 detectives. That’s an increase of 43 detectives, or just 21% of the 200-person increase the Mayor has claimed to deliver.1
By my math, that puts us about 157 detectives short. Plenty of candidates promise plenty of things on the campaign trail. If Johnson had just fallen short on a campaign promise in a difficult budget environment, I’d be skipping right past this to the clearance rate question. But the administration continues to insist that it’s accomplished something that it obviously hasn’t.
Our clearance rates are also nothing to brag about
While the number of detectives is a pretty cut and dry figure, Chicago’s clearance rates are a little trickier to parse. That’s because the ‘clearance rate’ doesn’t just reflect the share of murders the Chicago Police Department solves in a given year. Instead, CPD divides all homicides ‘closed’ in a given year – whether they were committed in that year or in a previous year - by the number of homicide investigations ‘opened’ in that year – i.e., the number of homicides recorded. That’s the standard convention dictated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but that numerator/denominator mismatch can give you some pretty messy numbers.2
It’s also worth noting that not all ‘closed’ homicide investigations end with a speedy prosecution that helps break the cycle of violence. CPD can also ‘close’ a case if detectives believe they know who committed the crime, but the State’s Attorney’s Office is unwilling to prosecute (and detectives determine there is no more evidence that they can collect). CPD can also close a case exceptionally if the detectives determine that the offender is deceased.
That means that even if the murder rate were to stay consistent, the clearance rate could go up for a number of reasons:
CPD can do a better job investigating murders, resulting in more prosecutions (this is the good reason)
CPD can give up on more investigations, closing out cases that the State’s Attorney’s Office declines to prosecute
CPD can determine that the likely offender in a case is dead, and therefore cannot be prosecuted
CPD can investigate cases from prior years, (even decades ago!), and do any of the above
To get to the bottom of what’s actually going on with our clearance rates, I obtained the raw homicide clearance data from the Chicago Police Department for 2021-2026 via Freedom of Information Act request. I matched that up with the homicide data from the Chicago Open Data portal to calculate clearance rates by type.
As you can see on the chart below, CPD’s overall clearance rate hit an all time high of 68% in 2025. That’s in line with similar figures calculated by the Office of the Inspector General (68.5%) and CPD (71%). It’s not clear to me how the Mayor’s Office managed to get all the way up to a 77% value.
More importantly, while CPD is clearing a slightly higher share of homicides with timely prosecutions than it did previously, that accounts for just one percentage point of the twenty point increase in our clearance rates from 2022 to 2025.3 The majority of the increase (18 percentage points) has come from a greater reliance on the ‘bar to prosecute’ category.
In short, while we may have gotten slightly better at prosecuting crimes, we’ve gotten a lot better at giving up on prosecutions all together.
It’s worth noting here that this is not a problem that started in the current Administration. Back in 2022, the Sun-Times wrote an excellent piece calling out former Superintendent David Brown for touting a 50% clearance rate, even as 4ever fewer homicides actually resulted in prosecutions by the State’s Attorney’s Office. And while the FBI does permit Departments to close out cases in this manner, the Sun-Times piece noted that Chicago was relatively unique among big police departments in relying on exceptional clearances.
I think you should always be suspicious of an evaluation metric that a bureaucracy has direct control over. Whether it’s graduation rates, state test scores, or clearance rates, even if there is nothing nefarious going on, there will always be pressure to make decisions that flatter the organization over time.
But it’s hard to look at the graph above and not conclude that something has changed in the last few years. Why did we get so much more aggressive about using the ‘bar to prosecute’ designation in 2024 and 2025?
Officers across the country have noted that it’s gotten harder to secure prosecutions and jury convictions – standards for evidence have gone up, and what might have passed for a clearance in the past is no longer good enough.5
But I doubt that we’ve seen major changes by the State’s Attorney’s Office in the last two years. If anything, I’d imagine that Eileen O’Neill Burke, who was elected in 2024 and assumed office in 2025 is probably more willing to bring charges in marginal cases than her predecessor.
A political controversy obscuring a policy catastrophe
I think it’s reasonable to read this all as an indictment of the Mayor. But in a larger sense, I don’t think that’s the most important conclusion. The biggest issue is that in the last few years, only 20-25% of the homicides committed in Chicago have resulted in a timely prosecution.
Chicago is an outlier here. In 2025, the New York Police Department cleared 255 murder cases. 287 murders were committed last year in New York, which nets out to a clearance rate of 89%. But only 3 of those clearances were exceptional. The other 252 cases were cleared with arrests and prosecutions – for an arrest-based clearance rate of 88%.
Notably, the NYPD clears roughly half of murders by arrest in the same quarter they’re committed - which is a far higher rate than CPD clears by arrest overall.6
While we kick around clearance numbers that have become wildly divorced from the actual arrest rates, the Mayor, Chicago Police Department, media, and everyone else engages in a bit of collective delusion about how much trouble we’re in.
It’s worth calling out misleading statistics that obscure the city’s underlying problems. But it’s far more valuable to turn back to the policy solutions that could actually make a difference—such as (actually) putting more detectives to work, continuing to improve investigative processes, and investing in technology and support systems to help detectives do their job. That’s where we’ll turn next.
Update (6/25/26, 9:45AM):
The Mayor’s Press Office did not like this morning’s article. I received a note a few minutes ago which pointed to clearance rates in portions of the last year (i.e., a 74% clearance rate through May of this year, and a 77% clearance rate in the month of August of last year) as justification for the claimed 77% clearance rate.
On detectives, the press office wrote that “we have never claimed a net gain of 200 detectives.” Instead, the contention is that the 200 detectives claim is accurate because at least 200 new detectives were added to the Department before netting out retirements and promotions.
I have some thoughts about this response.
On clearances, it makes sense that CPD has hit higher clearance rates in some individual months (i.e., August of last year). But then that August figure is being touted in an annual wrap-up press release as “CPD reached 77% homicide clearance rate—its highest level in decades.” I don’t really care about how technical we want to get here, but the real clearance rate for 2025 (before adjusting for all of the ‘exceptional clearances’) was 70%.
On detectives, it is unclear to me why anyone should score the Mayor on a gross change in number of detectives hired, instead of the net change that accounts for retirements and transfers. It’d be just as accurate to claim that “CPD lost at least 157 detectives on Brandon Johnson’s watch.” Just as there are technically at least 200 detectives working for the Department now who didn’t in 2022, there are at least 157 detectives no longer on the job. But that’d be wildly misleading and unfair, and wouldn’t tell you anything about the actual staffing strength of the Bureau of Detectives.
So, can you find a technical defense of the Mayor’s statements? Sure. But I don’t think that’s really the point here.
Some other programming notes:
Richard was on Fox 32’s Four Star City Podcast the other week talking Shotspotter. You can check it out here.
We’re starting to build out our social media footprint. If that’s your thing, you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
The Mayor was inaugurated in the middle of May. If you count from May ’23 to May ’26, the numbers look a little better (up 70 detectives, or roughly 35% of the target). But they’re still far from the promised (or claimed) goal.
Theoretically you could fail to clear any murders committed in a given year, but could end up with a clearance rate over 100%, if you cleared even *more* murders from prior years, for example.
That rises to four points if you include prosecutions for older homicides. Notably, the average age of those cold case homicides has dropped a bit - from 6.1 years in 2021 down to 2.1 years in 2025, which is probably a sign of progress.
Notably, the good people at Live Free Illinois have been publicizing this issue and the impact it has on families across the city for years. And CWB wrote about this problem earlier this year.
Some of that is probably a good thing – we are still paying (morally and financially) for past prosecutions based on coerced confessions and shoddy evidence.
According to the PERF/BJA report I referenced earlier, the NYPD also employes a significantly higher share of the department in detective roles (11.4% vs. 8.4%, as of 2019).
Less than a third of murders being cleared with arrest or prosecution is appalling! Well done bringing this to light.
Some cities, like Omaha or St. Paul, regularly solve more than 95% of their homicides, year after year.