Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Lies, damned lies, and statistics are usually tossed around as a wink at statistical mischief. The phrase has been attributed to both American author Mark Twain and former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. In Chicago, when it comes to crime, it reads less like a quip and more like an operating manual. Crime in the city has always lived at the intersection of fear, politics, and data. And when those three collide the result is a statistical fog thick enough to obscure almost anything.
What is most insidious are the “damned lies,” which are the technically true but profoundly misleading claims that rely on selective data windows, geographic cherry-picking, or definitional tricks. For example, a mayor announces murders are down on the year, but the comparison window begins after a pandemic spike and ignores that shootings remain elevated relative to pre-2019 baselines; a press release highlights downtown crime declines while the West Side experiences flat or rising rates; a city dashboard emphasizes percentage reductions without disclosing that the underlying counts remain stubbornly high in a few critical districts.
At the most granular level, CPD’s own categorization practices skirt transparency: what appears as a “motor vehicle theft” may in fact include conduct the public would understand as a carjacking; a shooting that does not cause “great bodily harm” may be coded differently despite being indistinguishable to the victim. In a city where political capital fluctuates with every headline, the temptation to sculpt numbers into digestible narratives is powerful. Chicago’s political class rarely resists that temptation, and the public is left sorting through statistical wreckage.
The deepest statistical distortion has nothing to do with massaging numbers and everything to do with medical progress, much of it due to the Vietnam War. The trauma care in that war made huge strides that eventually found its way to violent urban areas. Chicago would look far more deadly today if trauma care had not improved at the pace it has. This is the great unspoken truth of contemporary crime measurement: the line between “homicide” and “aggravated battery with a firearm” is no longer a stable indicator of how dangerous the city is. It is increasingly an indicator of how good the doctors and paramedics are. In the 1980s, gunshots to the abdomen in Englewood or Austin were frequently fatal.
Today, thanks to faster EMS response, improved triage protocols, rapid blood-infusion techniques, and world-class Level I trauma centers at Stroger, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and Mount Sinai, many victims survive injuries that would have been fatal 30 years ago. The city’s 2018 addition of a Level I trauma center on the South Side alone has saved an untold number of lives by reducing transport times that once stretched into dangerous minutes. Chicago’s homicide rate has fallen relative to earlier eras, but the number of people being shot has not fallen at the same rate. The statistics have shifted because medicine changed, not because the nature of violence changed. A city that measures only fatalities while ignoring survivorship trends is a city misunderstanding its own risk profile.
This medical miracle is simultaneously a civic blessing and a statistical curse. It allows officials to tout declining homicide rates without acknowledging that the underlying volume of armed conflict has not fallen proportionally. It obscures the burden placed on hospitals, which now shoulder responsibility for preventing young shooting survivors from returning as repeat victims. And it complicates public policy debates because the wrong indicator, fatalities rather than shootings, often becomes the centerpiece of political argument. Chicago’s crime debate cannot be honest unless it accounts for the way modern trauma care reshapes the definition of “violent crime” itself.
Honesty also requires confronting the vacuum where reliable data should be. Chicago is complete with data dashboards, but thin on raw, accessible statistics. The public can see how many shootings occurred last month but cannot see how many suspects had 10 or more prior arrests; how many of those priors were for felonies or violent offenses; how many shootings involve individuals previously flagged by risk-assessment tools; or how many victims were on electronic monitoring at the time of the incident. These datasets exist inside Chicago Police Department's (CPD) CLEAR system, the Sheriff’s Office’s case management tools, and the court’s electronic docketing system. They are released only in fragments, an isolated line in a press conference, a leaked figure in a policy memo, or a narrow snapshot inside an academic partnership. What is missing is precisely what matters most: the full distribution of the criminal histories of violent offenders, the charge-level breakdown of chronic arrestees, and the data that could settle whether Chicago’s “repeat violent offender” discourse is factual. I suspect that it is, but it would be nice if there was hard data to back it up.
The opacity is rarely accidental. Information that might show that a very small number of repeat offenders drive a disproportionate share of shootings could undermine progressive political narratives. Information that might show many of these individuals have long strings of low-level or non-violent arrests could undercut tough-on-crime messaging. And information that reveals inconsistent categorization, poor record-keeping, or unreliable coding practices would embarrass agencies already under consent-decree scrutiny. In a city where data can destabilize political coalitions, the safest bureaucratic posture is to disclose less, not more. The public is left with curated indicators, while the underlying truth remains sealed behind administrative doors.
Chicago’s crime debate will not be resolved until the data environment matures. The city needs sunlight, the greatest disinfectant of all. That means full, raw statistics that allow independent researchers, journalists, and residents to examine what is happening. Who exactly are these entities and how can pressure be applied to them? CPD has prior arrest histories, charge classifications (felony, misdemeanor, violent, gun), data used for predictive tools (SSL, gun offender registry), records of shootings, carjacking, clearances, reclassifications. What are the pressure points to be applied? The CPD's FOIA Office, The CPD Superintendent/Command Staff, The City Council Public Safety Committee, The Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) which has subpoena power, Cook Couty Sheriff’s Office which has jail population and electronic monitoring data, Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA). That means releasing felony-versus-misdemeanor breakdowns of prior arrests for shooting and homicide suspects; providing multi-year data on repeat violent offenders; exposing classification practices that bury carjackings inside motor-vehicle-theft categories; and acknowledging the medical factors that suppress homicide totals.
Sunlight will not solve violence, but it will disinfect the public debate. Without transparency, every discussion devolves into dueling narratives untethered from the complexity of actual conditions. With transparency, policy debates can reflect reality rather than curated illusions.
What Chicago lacks now is data honesty. The path to clarity is straightforward: Release what is known, investigate what is unknown, correct what is misleading, and allow residents to confront the full truth rather than a politically convenient slice of it. Lies and damned lies will always find oxygen in civic life. Statistics only become tools of deception when the public is denied access to the numbers behind them. Chicago deserves better than a fog of selective reporting and curated interpretations. It deserves the disinfecting force of daylight and the confidence that comes from seeing the true nature of crime in Chicago. It will take unrelenting public pressure on governmental agencies and the media that cover them.
