Crime is up like crazy. Crime reporting within departments is down

This is why the gold standard violent crime metric is homicides, which are consistently reported everywhere. Homicides in Chicago are sharply down (bears repeating that Chicago is nowhere near the top of the violent crime leaderboard in America --- it's just a lot bigger than people think it is).

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root_axis 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Based on what?

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Rebelgecko 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For things like shoplifting, that's plausible. But I have a hard time believing that murder rates are down because people are just ignoring dead bodies.

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freen 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would cops not report on crime?

Seems counter to the incentive structures of police departments.

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nickff 5 days ago | parent [-]

Not parent, and I don’t know about Chicago (I’ve never even visited Illinois), but if the police response is unsatisfying, people just don’t bother to report many crimes to the police. It is common for many ordinary people not to report property crimes unless required by an insurer, and many violent crimes against minorities or troubled people also go unreported due to lack of trust in the police.

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hedora 5 days ago | parent [-]

Almost all of the 2024 report talks about community trust in police. There’s a reason the crime stats start on page 108.

They also have stats on number of times people call or report crimes vs. number of arrests, gun pulls, etc.

Those stats overwhelmingly disprove the theory that trust in the police department has eroded and people are no longer reporting crime.

	▲	nickff 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Those stats actually indicate to me that many crimes are being under-reported, at least by certain groups. Compare the race & gender distribution of murder and aggravated assaults to other crimes; murders are obviously well-reported, but I highly suspect that the same people who are likely to be murdered are also likely to be robbed, battered, and assaulted, yet certain minorities make up much smaller proportions of reported victims in the 'less-heinous crimes'. Additionally, while you think that the ordering of the report is in order of police’s priorities, I (more cynically) think it reflects them ‘burying’ the numbers.