When it comes to Chicago and crime, perception isn’t always reality.
At times, 2025 brought deadly chaos to Chicago’s shimmering downtown: An 18-victim mass shooting in River North, the worst the city’s seen in years. The annual Christmas tree lighting marred by two more shootings, including the murder of a teen boy. A young woman from Indiana set on fire while riding the CTA Blue Line through the Loop.
Those crimes were red meat for those who revel in the city’s reputation as a lawless wasteland helmed by liberal politicians. But despite the headline-grabbing mayhem — which often distracts from the day-to-day violence that plays out in poorer neighborhoods across the city — in 2025 Chicago’s gun violence fell to levels not seen in a decade.
In fact, Chicago’s murder total in 2025 will be roughly half what it was just four years ago.
As of Tuesday, the city had logged 403 murders on the year, a 30% decrease from the same period in 2024, according to Chicago police. At the same time, 1,430 more people suffered nonfatal gunshot injuries, compared with 2,169 in the same period a year earlier — a 34% reduction.
That will make 2025 the fourth consecutive year of declines in Chicago’s entrenched gun violence, though the continuing drop is cold comfort to the scores of families still affected by shootings every year.
Predictably, perhaps wisely, no one is taking a victory lap.
“I feel like we still have work to do,” Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling, now in his third year leading the department, said during a recent interview with the Tribune. “You can always appreciate the decline and the decrease for those who have not been harmed and (are) feeling that things are getting safer, but you can never be happy until things are safe — completely safe.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get there, but as long as we continue to work toward that, we’ll have less people who are victimized (and) we’ll create a better and safer environment for everybody in Chicago,” he added.
The violence totals in 2025 are the lowest seen in Chicago since 2014, when the city ended the year with 425 murders and about 2,000 more shooting victims, according to city violence data.
2025 marked the fourth consecutive year of marked declines in shootings, keeping with a trend seen in major cities across the country since the abatement of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
What’s more, in 2025 the Chicago Police Department reported double-digit declines in robberies, car thefts, burglaries and batteries.
Police operations
The sharp drop in killings year-over-year will benefit not just Chicago, but the homicide rate throughout the country, said Chuck Wexler, longtime director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based police think tank.
“Chicago dropping (at least) 25% will not only impact Chicago, but it’ll impact the homicide rate across the country with those kinds of numbers,” Wexler said. “Is this a trend across the country? Yes. But is Chicago seeing significantly bigger returns? Absolutely.”
More cases are being solved, too. As of Dec. 23, CPD’s Bureau of Detectives reported a nearly 72% homicide clearance rate, the highest in at least a decade, according to a department spokesperson.
Through mid-December, CPD records show, the city’s officers made more than 35,800 arrests, a slight uptick from 2024. About 60% of the year’s arrests were related to assaults, batteries, narcotics and domestic violence, records show.
In an interview with the Tribune earlier this month, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke pointed to stricter policies around seeking detention and prison sentences that she implemented upon taking office, including mandating that prosecutors ask for detention in all cases if they meet certain criteria, as well as seeking prison sentences in every felony case involving machine gun-type weapons.
“One of the few levers we can pull is to let people know we take this very, very seriously,” she said of certain gun cases. “This is a very serious crime. And the way we can do that is ask for detention and jail time. It’s one of the few levers available to us.”
Burke’s policies, though, have often elicited criticism from advocates, community members and some lawmakers who see stricter stances on incarceration as a step backward. Her time in office has correlated with an increase in Cook County’s jail population after years of decline.
Meanwhile, CPD’s warrant activity remained steady. Through mid-November, CPD officers had executed a little more than 1,400 search warrants in 2025, according to records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Officers executed about 1,500 warrants in all of 2024.
All across the city, CPD officers once again recovered about 1,000 guns each month this year. A recent Tribune analysis found that, of the more than 11,000 guns confiscated through mid-December, nearly 400 were “privately made firearms” — effectively untraceable “ghost guns” made without serial numbers.
The year was not without tragedy for CPD.
In June, Officer Krystal Rivera was shot and killed by a fellow officer as they tried to arrest an alleged weapons suspect in an apartment in the 8200 block of South Drexel. Rivera, a 36-year-old mother to an adolescent daughter, was the first CPD officer to die in a friendly fire incident in nearly 40 years.
Earlier this month, Rivera’s family filed a lawsuit against the city, CPD and the officer who fired the fatal bullet. The nine-count suit alleges willful and wanton conduct, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The first hearing in that case is scheduled for next February, records show.
‘Midway Blitz’
Of course, CPD was not the only law enforcement body working in Chicago in 2025.
Much of the year’s second half was marked by the highly publicized influx of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection — despite Chicago being several hundred miles from the Canadian border.
As Operation Midway Blitz took hold in September and October, city crime data revealed a steep decline in calls placed to Chicago’s 911 center. The drop-off was especially pronounced in CPD’s Ogden District, which covers the Little Village neighborhood, the most populous Mexican American community in the city.
The decline reflected more than just safer streets in Little Village, as experts suggested all interactions with police were likely suppressed — including calls from crime victims seeking help. Federal officials advertised the effort as an attempt to take the “worst of the worst” of the streets, but there was a clear chilling effect for others whose neighborhoods were affected most.
Matt DeMateo, executive director of New Life Centers, a nonprofit serving youths and families in the neighborhood, previously told the Tribune residents’ fear, fueled by federal immigration enforcement, may have driven some of the decline.
“It’s less about trust in police, it’s more about fear,” DeMateo said. “ICE is creating chaos, and people are making decisions for their own safety.”
Use of resources
As of November, CPD counted 11,541 sworn officers, according to the city’s Office of Inspector General. That’s about 80 fewer officers than a year earlier.
More than half of those officers are assigned to CPD’s 22 patrol districts, and a long-awaited workforce allocation study — which could affect future assignments and deployments — is expected to be completed soon. The study, mandated by the ongoing federal consent decree, has remained an elusive target for the Police Department. Last year, Snelling blamed “red tape” for the repeated delays in producing it.
“How the CPD chooses to allocate its resources and workforce truly matters. It can facilitate effective policing and reform efforts or hinder them,” Maggie Hickey, head of the independent monitoring group that assesses the city’s consent decree compliance, said during a status hearing earlier this year.
“In our reports, we have consistently expressed concerns about key (CPD) units being under resourced,” Hickey said, “and we hope that the results of this study will help the city and CPD realign its resources to meet the requirements of the consent decree and to meet the needs of Chicago’s communities.”
In the interim, CPD continues to rack up overtime spending. The city’s OIG found that, through December, the department had spent more than $233 million on overtime in 2025.
According to the Civic Federation, overtime has exceeded budget amounts for the past six years “at times by staggering amounts.” While the city budgeted $100 million for CPD overtime in 2023 and 2024, for example, it actually spent about $283 million and $238 million respectively, which either indicates unrealistic budgeting, “inefficient use of personnel, or both,” the analysis concluded.
There were staggering outside expenses, too.
By September, the City Council had already approved payments totaling more than $220 million to settle lawsuits related to alleged CPD misconduct. That month, aldermen approved another settlement — the first of its kind — authorizing another $90 million to close litigation tied to corrupt former CPD sergeant Ronald Watts.
Police oversight
CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the two bodies that investigate the lion’s share of misconduct complaints against CPD officers, continued their efforts in 2025 as the future of the Police Department’s disciplinary adjudication process remains hazy.
After more than two years of litigation, the Illinois Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in 2026 in the impasse between the city and Fraternal Order of Police over the public’s access to disciplinary hearings in the most serious misconduct cases.
In 2023, an arbitrator overseeing contract negotiations between the union and the city ruled that officers may opt for those cases to be heard and decided by a third-party instead of the Chicago Police Board.
During the slowdown, a backlog of disciplinary cases awaiting decisions by Snelling has ballooned to nearly 500.
Appearing this month on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight,” FOP President John Catanzara argued that CPD officers, as public employees represented by a collective bargaining unit, have always had the right to adjudicate those cases via an arbitrator, but the union didn’t exercise that right until the most recent negotiations.
Catanzara noted, too, that CPD officers are legally barred from going on strike, but suggested a future trade-off.
“If the (Illinois) General Assembly and the City of Chicago wish to give police officers the right to strike like the teachers, we’ll gladly trade that for arbitration,” he said. “In a heartbeat.”
Though they garner the most attention, cases that involve the Police Board account for only a small fraction of officers’ alleged misconduct. Each year, Police Department supervisors issue thousands of Summary Action Punishment Requests that can result in an officer reprimand or a one- to three-day suspension from work.
The department recently changed policy to see that every firearm pointing incident is now reviewed by a district captain — one of the highest-ranking officers in each patrol district, who uniformed officers interact with often.
In October, the monitoring team tasked with gauging the city’s and Police Department’s adherence to a federal consent decree released its 12th report. The monitoring team found the department to be in preliminary compliance with 94% of the consent decree’s mandates as of June 2025.
CPD had reached secondary compliance in 65% of consent decree paragraphs, meaning the department had established a policy and started training officers. Full compliance — where the policy is incorporated in police day-to-day operations — was reached in 23% of the consent decree, according to the monitoring team.
Through early December, COPA reported 15 shootings by Chicago officers, up from the nine in 2024. Since the start of the year, COPA has opened investigations into 36 weapon discharges by officers, city records show. The majority of COPA’s investigations concern allegations of civil rights abuses, operational violations and excessive force.
The department acknowledged, too, an increase in the number of officer-submitted tactical response reports — TRRs. Those reports are submitted whenever an officer uses force during the performance of their duties, but Snelling noted that officers are now required to submit a TRR if they are the victim of a battery.
“The more you get on paper, the more you can assess what’s going on,” Snelling said. “The more you create training around it, you can determine if there (are) patterns or practices that you need to address.”
Chicago Tribune’s Madeline Buckley contributed to this story.