Illinois Governor JB Pritzker at first denied, then dismissed Chicago’s notorious murder rate among America’s most populous cities.
Pritzker sat for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Thursday evening and was forced to defend his approach to crime when his state’s capital is consistently one of the worst ranked among comparable urban areas.
The Democratic governor at first claimed that Chicago is “not in the top 30 in terms of our murder rate” before Baier brought up a map of the United States’ most populous cities, showing Chicago’s murder rate, at 17.47 per 100,000 people, higher than that of Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.
“Look, you can pull statistics up. I can, too,” Pritzker responded before asserting that “our murder rate has been cut in half” over four years.
While true, the significant drop in Chicago’s murder rate, down from a peak in 2021 of 30.1 per 100,000 people, mirrors a trend reflected across the United States and is not necessarily because of any specific action taken by Pritzker. Homicide rates have plummeted across the country since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic when millions of people were barred from work or other activities.
Chicago’s current homicide rate is just better than what it was in 2019 before the pandemic when the city tallied 18.9 murders per 100,000 people.
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Pritzker declined to note the national trend in crime since the pandemic and instead pointed to his own policies.
“Very importantly, we’ve been doing the things that are necessary to bring crime down,” Pritzker claimed. “We’ve invested in community violence interruption. We’ve invested in police. I’ve added more state police than any governor in quite a long time. It’s very important that we do both of those things, and more, to invest in our communities so that we bring crime down.”
WATCH: @BretBaier presses Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on why Chicago has the highest murder rate of all big American cities pic.twitter.com/LbhTU0CQMn
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 23, 2025
Pritzker has battled President Donald Trump in the media for weeks over the president’s attempts to crack down on crime in America’s most dangerous cities. The president’s anti-crime agenda has run parallel to his deportation agenda, though Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have struggled for backing from local law enforcement in deep blue areas.
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