{"id":163423,"date":"2025-09-06T22:24:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-claims-chicago-is-worlds-most-dangerous-city-the-four-most-violent-ones-are-all-in-red-states-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T22:24:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:24:00","slug":"trump-claims-chicago-is-worlds-most-dangerous-city-the-four-most-violent-ones-are-all-in-red-states-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-claims-chicago-is-worlds-most-dangerous-city-the-four-most-violent-ones-are-all-in-red-states-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump claims Chicago is \u2018world\u2019s most dangerous city\u2019. The four most violent ones are all in red states – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jackson, Birmingham, St Louis and Memphis had the highest murder rates in 2024 \u2013 all are Republican-led states
As Donald Trump<\/a> threatens to deploy national guard units to Chicago and Baltimore, ostensibly to quell violence, a pattern has emerged as he describes which <\/em>cities he talks about.
Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC<\/a> and Baltimore.
But not Jackson, Birmingham, St Louis or Memphis<\/a>.
An analysis of crime trends over the last four years shows two things. First, violent crime rates in America\u2019s big cities have been falling over the last two years, and at an even greater rate over the last six months. The decrease <\/em>in violence in America is unprecedented.
Second, crime in large cities in the aggregate is lower in states with Democratic leadership. But the president focuses his ire almost exclusively on large blue <\/em>cities in blue <\/em>states, sidestepping political conflict with red <\/em>Republican governors.
The four cities of populations larger than 100,000 with the highest murder rates in 2024 are in Republican states: Jackson, Mississippi<\/a> (78.7 per 100,000 residents), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), St Louis, Missouri (54.1) and Memphis, Tennessee (40.6).
On Tuesday, Trump called Chicago \u201cthe most dangerous city in the world\u201d, and pledged to send military troops there, as well as to Baltimore<\/a>. \u201cI have an obligation. This isn\u2019t a political thing,\u201d he said at a press conference. \u201cI have an obligation when 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks and 75 are shot with bullets.\u201d
When talking about crime in Chicago<\/a>, Trump regularly refers to the number of people who may have been shot and killed there. But Chicago has a population of about 2.7 million, which is larger than each of the least-populous 15 states. It is roughly the same population as Mississippi. Chicago\u2019s homicide rate for 2024 was 17.5 murders for every 100,000 residents, only a few points higher than that of the state of Louisiana, which was 14.5 per 100,000 in 2024.
As has become tradition, news outlets reported<\/a> how many people were killed in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend. At Louisiana\u2019s rates, one would predict almost twice as many people to have been murdered there over the long weekend.
But those numbers are harder to count. Chicago police report a single figure. One has to scour a hundred local news sites around Louisiana to aggregate the count for comparison.
Notably, Trump discussed sending troops to New Orleans this week. \u201cWe\u2019re making a determination now,\u201d Trump said in the Oval Office. \u201cDo we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to straighten out a very nice section of this country that\u2019s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad?\u201d
And Landry signaled his willingness to accede. \u201cWe will take President Trump\u2019s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!\u201d he wrote on X, posting <\/a>a clip of the exchange.
Still, Chicago is bracing<\/a> to be the next city targeted by the Trump administration. To date this year, 278 people have been killed in Chicago, 118 fewer people killed when compared with 2024. It is at pace for 412 deaths for the year, which would be a rate of about 15 per 100,000 residents. The rate is likely to be lower still than that, because homicide rates increase during summer months.
The Windy City ranked 37th in homicide rate in 2024 for cities larger than 50,000 residents in the United States. For cities with more than 100,000 residents, it placed 14th. This year, it is likely to slide farther down the list, even as violence falls to 60-year lows.
A<\/span>s reported<\/a> by the FBI\u2019s crime data unit in August, the United States had a homicide rate of about 4.6 per 100,000 residents in 2024. It is the lowest figure since 2014, and very close to the generational lows of 4 to 4.5 per 100,000 last experienced in the early 1960s. The pandemic wave of increased violence has largely receded.
\u201cWe know that across the nation [violence is] going down,\u201d said Dr Thaddeus Johnson, a former Tennessee police officer and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a policy thinktank.
The 2024 homicide rate in the US decreased by about 15%, one of the largest drops in American history. Most of that decrease can be attributed to declines in the largest cities, Johnson said.
Criminal justice researchers tend to place higher value on murder rates than other indicators of violent crime, because murder statistics are harder to manipulate. \u201cIt\u2019s the most trustworthy data point,\u201d Johnson said. But it\u2019s not the only data point. \u201cWhen you start talking about aggravated assaults and robberies, generally, we\u2019ve seen that going down across the nation as well.\u201d
Both Chicago and Baltimore implemented or expanded antiviolence programs<\/a> in 2022 using American Rescue Plan funding \u2013 much of which has been cut under Trump. Baltimore\u2019s homicide rate has fallen about 40% since 2020, and in 2025 is pacing a 50-year low to date.
Violent crime had also been falling in Washington DC by substantial margins before Trump took over the city\u2019s policing. His announcement last month referenced DC\u2019s 2023 crime rates, which spiked during the pandemic, while saying nothing about the precipitous fall since.
In January, the Metropolitan police department and US attorney\u2019s office reported<\/a> that total violent crime in DC in 2024 was down 35% from the prior year, marking the lowest rate in over 30 years.
The Guardian analyzed the murder rates for the largest 50 cities in the US and found that cities in blue states had the lowest, with just 7.8 murders per 100,000 people. The cities in red states have a much higher murder rate, of 12.9. Cities in swing states sit in the middle, with a murder rate of 10.2.
Baltimore ranks fifth on a list of cities over 50,000 population by murder rate in 2024, as reported to the FBI statisticians. Washington DC is 15th. Between them are Wilmington, Delaware; Detroit; Cleveland; Dayton, Ohio; North Little Rock, Arkansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Shreveport, Louisiana; Camden, New Jersey, and Albany, Georgia.
Compliance with federal rules on crime reporting is incomplete, and some agencies report incomplete data. One notable example of this is Jackson, Mississippi, which has consistently gathered crime data but only started submitting it to the FBI\u2019s system this year. Jackson recorded 111 homicides in 2024, in a population of about 141,000: a rate of 78.7, the highest in America for any city with a population over 50,000.
Though St Louis posted the second-highest homicide rate in 2024, violence there has been falling since 2023, and is on pace today for a 10% annual drop. Its rate will fall less sharply, however, because St Louis is losing population.
Memphis led the country\u2019s homicide rate in 2023. To date in 2025, murders and non-negligent homicides are down about 25%, after a 22% decrease in 2024. Like Baltimore, Memphis leaders attribute the decrease in part to an aggressive gun violence reduction initiative, Memphis Allies.
Notably, small changes in smaller cities can have a big statistical effect.
Birmingham, with a population of about 200,000, has cut its murder rate by more than half since the start of the year. Local officials attribute this, in part, to the arrest of a handful of people accused of violence, including Damien McDaniel, who has been charged in the murders of 18 people as a hired hitman<\/a>. His arrest in October \u2013 and that of four other people who are linked to him \u2013 coincides with a 55% drop in Birmingham\u2019s homicide rate since.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jackson, Birmingham, St Louis and Memphis had the highest murder rates in 2024 \u2013 all are Republican-led statesAs Donald Trump threatens to deploy national guard units to Chicago and Baltimore, ostensibly to quell violence, a pattern has emerged as he describes which cities he talks about.Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Baltimore.But not Jackson, Birmingham, St […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":163424,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}