Chicago City Wire

Two new studies show that Chicago continues to be vexed by gang-related crimes and the murders of those 19 and under.

Instances of both adults murdering kids and kids murdering kids is becoming “another defining feature of Chicago’s fall from greatness,” writes Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner of Wirepoints.

Ninety one kids aged 19-and-under were killed in Chicago in 2024. The numbers include a five-year-old girl and two seven-year-old boys, according to figures that Wirepoints obtained from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

Patrick Andriesen | Illinois Policy Institute

On May 26, a black girl aged five was shot in the chest.

On July 4, a latino boy, age seven, also died from a gunshot wound to the chest.

Dabrowski and Klingner break the tragic numbers down by race, gender, and location.

In all, minorities made up 98 percent of Chicago’s kids murdered in 2024 – 63 black, 26 latino and two white.

Many of the murders were committed on the south and the west sides

A separate study by Patrick Andriesen of the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI) shows that in 2023, 1,808 crimes were gang related, and that one in five homicides are attributable to gang activity.

Chicago neighborhoods each reported an average of more than 16 gang-related crimes. Total crimes per neighborhood averaged 2,776.

Garfield Park, for instance, had nine gang-related homicides in 2023. Chicago Lawn had five and Humboldt Park had three.

In a separate study, Andriesen wrote that the gang-related homicides in 2023 equaled the lowest ratio in two decades, according to the Chicago Police Department data.

But he also wrote that “the decline may be more about gangs splitting up and how well police can track gang members since their gang database was shut down in 2023. The problem is likely worse than the data shows,” one former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy told Illinois Policy Institute.

McCarthy said the apparent decline in overall gang crime could be overstated because Chicago police ended the operation of the Chicago gang database. It was shut down in September 2023 after nearly two decades of the system tracking suspected gang members.

“McCarthy said losing the database has likely made it more difficult for the police to track gang-related crimes. The shutdown was ordered by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability after an inspector general report found it contained outdated and incomplete data with few controls to ensure accuracy of gang designations.”

Despite the issues with the database, McCarthy said a data-driven policing approach in general has proven the most effective way to tackle and prevent gang crime.

“The CPD had five consecutive years of reducing police-related shootings and five consecutive years of reducing the number of arrests because we weren’t just grabbing anybody,” McCarthy said. “What we were doing was interrupting and preventing retaliation by grabbing guns from the gangs who just became the victim.”