Both Chicago and New York City are having a better year in 2025. Murders are down in both places, and that’s good news. New York is at 275 murders year to date through November 16, 2025, down 20.5% from last year at this time. Chicago is also sharply lower this year, but it has still logged roughly the mid-300s in murders so far, far below the recent peak of about 805 in 2021, yet still a brutal toll for one city.
Even in a “down” year, Chicago remains far more dangerous than New York on murder. Chicago has about one-third of NYC’s population, yet it’s on pace again to end the year with more murders than New York. That means the risk of being killed in Chicago stays several times higher.
And what happened this week on the CTA shows why Chicagoans don’t feel safe. A 26-year-old woman, Bethany MaGee, was allegedly doused with gasoline and set on fire on a Blue Line train. The man charged, Lawrence Reed (50), has a long record — about 72 prior arrests and at least 15 convictions — and was out on pretrial release with electronic monitoring. Call it what you want, but under the SAFE-T Act era this is the nightmare people warned about: someone with that history should not have been on the street. Bethany is in critical condition, and she deserves every prayer for a full recovery.
The larger pattern is just as grim. In Chicago, homicide is heavily concentrated in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Recent city data show Black and Hispanic residents make up around 95% of homicide victims, with Black Chicagoans alone about three-quarters of victims when race is known. When offender race is known, the breakdown largely mirrors victims: most offenders are Black, a large minority are Hispanic, and a small share are White.
New York’s racial concentration is real too, just at a much lower level of killing. In NYPD’s latest full-year data (2024), murder victims were 52.5% Black and 34.7% Hispanic, with White victims at 7.0%. Suspects were almost identical: 53.3% Black, 35.8% Hispanic, 7.0% White.
So yes, both cities are improving. But New York shows what it looks like to drive murders down and keep them down. Chicago shows what it looks like to improve yet still live with off-the-charts killing. And in both places, the burden falls overwhelmingly on Black and Latino residents. Until leaders treat that as an emergency — not a talking point — the trend lines won’t feel like safety to the people living it.
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