Because the city is run by Democrats and because it is wrongly perceived as majority Black and singularly violent, Republicans have used “Chicago” as a kind of code word. Chicago, in their telling, is what you get when Democrats are in charge and Black people have run amok. In an argument that ignores the bright-blue city’s adjacency to bright-red Indiana and its anything-goes gun culture, Republican critics cite Chicago as proof that gun restrictions don’t work.
Let’s start with the idea of crime, specifically murders. Does Chicago have the most of any American city? Yes. But there are only two cities in the country — New York and Los Angeles — that are bigger than Chicago. In fact, with 2.7 million people, Chicago has more people than 15 states. In December, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., disregarded data that shows that Louisiana has the second-highest firearm death rate in the nation as he maligned Chicago as “America’s largest outdoor shooting range.”
As Jeff Asher, of the data analysis research firm AH Datalytics, said in a phone conversation Thursday, “Chicago has the most of everything only because it has almost the most people. In terms of [crime] rates, Chicago is usually outside of the top 10 in terms of murder rate, violent crime.”
There used to be a relationship between the prevalence of crime and the perception of crime, Asher said, “but I don’t think there is anymore. I think people have created in their minds the situation where either crime is going up or the data is wrong.” In the 1990s, how people felt about crime “matched up pretty closely” to how much crime there was. “Ever since then, the share of people that told Gallup that crime is going up has been above 50% regardless of the direction that crime has gone that year.”
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