Data Show Violent Crime Has Been On The Rise For Last 3 Years In Chicago

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Data make clear that the people of Chicago are caught in the crosshairs.

Our own research has found that violent crimes are all up over the last three years in Chicago.

For this research using publicly-available data from Chicago Police on the Chicago Data Portal, we focused on violent crimes as defined by the FBI – homicides, aggravated assaults, aggravated batteries, robberies, and sexual assaults.

Annual Trends

In 2021, there were 25,894 violent crimes reported in Chicago. That is slightly higher than in 2020 and 2019, but within the range of normal crime levels in previous years. Below is a table of the totals by category. We broke out carjacking separately even though it is technically a subcategory of robbery, because robberies generally went down while carjackings increased.

This line graph also displays the trends.

By Neighborhood

We know that not all communities are impacted by violent crime equally. In terms of raw numbers, there are several neighborhoods that stand out. Here are the top 10.

You will notice, however, that the compared to the average number of reports during the five years before the pandemic – 2015 through 2019 – many of the neighborhoods above actually saw slight decreases in crime levels. Most of them are within a minor range of +/- 5 percent change. But South Shore had a significant jump in violent crime amounting to 19.2 percent, making it unique among the neighborhoods with the highest volume of violent crime.

In terms of increases in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels, however, a different list of neighborhoods stands out. Here's are the top 10 in terms of change versus that average (note that "O'Hare" refers to the neighborhood directly to the east of O'Hare International Airport):

This interactive map shows a complete breakdown of violent crime by neighborhood.