CHICAGO (WGN) – When President Trump claimed in an all-caps post on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD” it was the latest in a string of statements from the White House that are at best misleading and, at worst, false.
Trump and his team have used out-sized claims about crime to justify a threatened deployment of the National Guard which has yet to materialize.
On August 25, the White House posted a press release with links to “facts on Chicago’s crime problem.” But rather than ring up the FBI or the Justice Department for its crime facts, the White House offered links to right-leaning websites, a few local news stories and a working paper from the Rochester Institute of Technology (pdf).
WGN Investigates reached out to the professor who wrote the paper cited in the White House’s crime claims.
“I’m like ‘this is just what I need right now! I’ve got to respond to the White House putting my paper up!” Irshad Altheimer, Ph.D said with a laugh. He’s the director of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Public Safety Initiatives.
Altheimer explained the document the White House used to make far-reaching claims about crime is produced every year to help the Rochester, New York know how its homicide numbers compare to a handful of other cities.
“I’m very uncomfortable when any politician from any party cherry picks our research to make a point, particularly if that point is devoid of larger context,” Altheimer said. “I can’t get into their intentions; but it was very clear to me there was some cherry-picking around data and I think that’s very dangerous.”
WGN Investigates has extensively reported on Chicago’s crime struggle. While it’s true, for example, Chicago has more murders than Los Angeles and New York City, the White House claim ignores how most criminologists track safety statistics. They track the rate of crime. Specifically, the number of murders per 100,000 people. By that measure, you have a far higher chance of being murdered in cities such as Birmingham, Ala., Jackson, Miss., St. Louis, Missouir and Detroit, Mich.
“If you think about our national discussion now about violence, you’d think that we are more vulnerable than we’ve ever been, we’re more at risk than we’ve ever been,” said Altheimer. “But if you look at the national data and compare today to 2021, you find for most American cities a 40-to-50 percent reduction in crime.”
Additional helpful resources:
- Chicago Police Department crime statistics
- Chicago violence reduction dashboard
- FBI crime data
- Gun violence archive
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