Chicago is the New ‘Murder Capital’, But There’s Some Good News

There's one title that has been passed around in recent years, but St. Louis, Missouri has been slapped with the 'murder capital' moniker more often than not. Well, based on new data, there's a new king of this awful distinction, but there's also some very good news to go along with that also.

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For many years, St. Louis was the city associated with a high murder rate. Last year, Detroit was also slapped with disturbing loss of life data. Now, there's brand new data from 24/7 Wall St that says Chicago, Illinois is the American city with the highest number of murders. They say "The city with the most murders was Chicago, at 599". But, if you dig deeper, you'll see this really is good news, believe it or not.

How exactly is a sky high murder rate in Chicago good news? The murder rate in the Windy City is down 13% year over year from 2022 to 2023. It gets even better if you stand back and look at the past 3 years with Chicago's murder rate on the decline big time to the tune of about 20% from 2020 through 2022.

Zooming back even further to a look at regions of the country, violent crime and the murder rate in the Midwest as a whole is down over 12%.

Don't misunderstand. Even one violent crime and especially murder is one too many. However, it's important to see that this storm cloud of awfulness does have a silver lining, sort of. It's never good news when you see a city like Chicago with several hundred losing their lives within its confines. But, it is encouraging that the numbers are at least going down if only slightly.