New federal data proves America’s crime surge is concentrated in its cities — and no city has done more to invite it than ours
President Donald Trump has been called every name in the book for saying that America’s cities have become dangerous, chaotic, and unlivable. His critics call it fearmongering. The Associated Press even sniffed his “rhetoric mirrors conservatives going back decades who have denounced cities, especially those with majority nonwhite populations or led by progressives, as lawless or crime ridden.”
Well, brace yourself, because the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BSJ) — not Fox News, not the NRA, not “right-wing media” — has just confirmed that Trump was right.
According to new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, violent crime in America’s cities jumped 61 percent between 2019 and 2024. Suburban and rural areas saw no such surge. In fact, their increases — four and two percent respectively — weren’t even statistically significant.
Let’s translate that out of bureaucratese: Crime is up in the cities and only in the cities. And that’s not because of the police, or poverty, or “systemic racism.” It’s because of a political ideology that declared war on policing itself.
The numbers don’t lie — but politicians do
Back in 2019 — before George Floyd, before “defund the police,” before mayors decided criminals were victims and victims were oppressors — the rate of violent crime in urban America was roughly the same as the national average. By 2024, it was 46 percent higher than the national rate and 104 percent higher than the rural rate.
Property crime, always higher in cities, widened its lead too. The number of property crimes per 1,000 households hit 181.6 in urban areas, compared with 96.1 in the suburbs and 48.3 in rural America.
If this were a pandemic, the CDC would be screaming for lockdowns and federal funding. But since it’s a law-and-order issue, the Left is suddenly allergic to data.
Chicago: The nation’s petri dish for failed policy
Here in Chicago, we don’t need a survey to tell us crime is out of control. We live it every day.
Last year, more than 600 murders were logged — and that’s before you count the non-fatal shootings, carjackings, and robberies that never even make it into the police blotter. The city now treats weekend homicide tallies like weather reports. “Good news,” they’ll say — “only 14 shot this weekend.”
The Wall Street Journal report only confirms what every Chicagoan already knows: Violent crime isn’t evenly distributed across America. It’s urban, it’s ideological, and it’s the direct consequence of leaders like Mayor Brandon “6.6” Johnson, who view law enforcement as a disease, not a cure.
Johnson’s great contribution to public safety has been to “reimagine” it. That means fewer patrol officers, more “violence interrupters,” and endless talk about root causes. The only thing he’s interrupted is the chain of command.
Meanwhile, Cook County’s own political queen, Boss Toni Preckwinkle, continues to run a justice system that treats criminals like customers. The State’s Attorney’s Office is finally showing signs of life under Eileen O’Neill Burke, but for years, the message to offenders under Kim Foxx was simple: You won’t be prosecuted unless you commit murder — and even then, we’ll negotiate.
The ideology of denial
The spike in urban crime didn’t come out of nowhere. It coincides neatly with the era when “systemic racism” became a catchall explanation for everything wrong with America, and “defund the police” became a fashionable slogan among the young, the woke, and the professionally offended.
In 2020, police were told to stand down. Prosecutors were told to go soft. Judges were told to empathize. The result was predictable — unless you majored in sociology.
When you stop enforcing laws, people stop obeying them. When you stop locking up criminals, they stop fearing consequences. When you decide “equity” matters more than order, you get neither.
The federal response — and the urban revolt
Trump, seeing the obvious, has begun sending National Guard units to some of the nation’s most violent cities — Washington, D.C., and Portland among them. Predictably, local officials howled that he was turning America into a police state. But the numbers tell a different story.
In D.C., homicides are up 61 percent since 2017. In Portland, they’ve nearly doubled since 2019.
Sound familiar? It should. Chicago’s leadership has been singing the same tune — obstructing federal law enforcement at every turn. Whether it’s immigration enforcement, anti-gang task forces, or ICE raids against Venezuelan cartels, the city’s reflexive response is resistance.
That’s why this new BJS report matters: It exposes the moral inversion at the heart of modern urban politics. Progressive mayors have made open rebellion against federal authority into a badge of honor — even when it means shielding criminals, defying immigration law, and abandoning the very citizens they swore to protect.
When city leaders start defying the law, they become the lawbreakers. It’s Fort Sumter all over again, only this time the shots are fired on the South Side.
The inconvenient truth about crime and race
Here’s another uncomfortable fact buried in the federal report: nationally, crime isn’t primarily interracial. It’s intraracial. A majority — 52 percent — of incidents involving black victims also involved black offenders. That’s not an accusation. That’s data.
So much for the progressive narrative of white oppression and black victimhood. Crime in the city isn’t a racial morality play; it’s a collapse of order. And that collapse is being rationalized by people too cowardly to admit that their own policies made it worse.
White offenders, by the way, made up just seven percent of incidents involving black victims — despite whites constituting 60 percent of the population. In other words, systemic racism isn’t driving this. Systemic stupidity is.
The media’s complicity
The mainstream media’s role in this deception deserves special mention. Instead of investigating crime, they’ve been policing language. Reporters write about “gun violence” — not gangs. They speak of “food deserts” and “disinvestment” instead of the decades-long political rot that destroyed once-proud neighborhoods.
The press now treats criminals as sociological specimens and taxpayers as punchlines. When they can’t bury a story, they bury it under euphemisms.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey H. Anderson did what the New York Times and the AP refused to do: He read the data and reported it straight. For that, he’ll be accused of “stoking fear.” But truth isn’t fear. Truth is clarity.
The cost of cowardice
Every time a politician says, “we need to address the root causes,” what they mean is “we’re not going to do anything that might actually work.” The root cause of violent crime isn’t poverty, racism, or guns. It’s impunity.
You cannot fix a moral collapse with social spending. You can only fix it by restoring consequences. That means rebuilding police departments, reinstating prosecutorial integrity, and throwing out the mayors and aldermen who think “law and order” is a racist slogan.
Chicago’s reckoning
Chicago is running out of rope. Businesses are fleeing. Tourists are staying away. Even the Democratic establishment is turning on Johnson behind closed doors. The same politicians who once rode the “defund” wave now pretend they never heard the phrase.
But the damage is done. Chicago’s name is now shorthand for dysfunction. When people in Omaha or Atlanta or Boise hear “urban America,” they picture us. They picture the shootings, the carjackings, the boarded-up Loop storefronts.
Conclusion: The truth hurts — and that’s why it matters
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has no ideology. It just counts victims. And its count proves what everyone with a shred of common sense already knew: America’s urban experiment in social justice has failed.
Trump may not be polite, but he’s right — our cities are broken. The only way to save them is to stop lying about what broke them.
Chicago doesn’t need to be reimagined. It needs to be rebuilt — from the top down. After all, the fish stinks from the head.
