Last year, some Chicagoans, fed up with the repeated denunciations of their city—denunciations regularly uttered by former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Fox News—turned their anger into T-shirts. One read: “Shut up Chicago, you don’t live here.”
Republicans used the word “Chicago” as a kind of code word. In their narrative, Chicago is what you get when Democrats are in power and blacks are everywhere.
Don’t count on Republicans to heed this advice. Because the city is run by Democrats and is mistakenly seen as predominantly black and particularly violent, Republicans have used “Chicago” as a kind of code word. Chicago, in their narrative, is what you get when Democrats are in power and black people are out of control. In an argument that ignores the city’s bright blue neighborhood with bright red Indiana and its unblemished gun culture, Republican critics cite Chicago as proof that gun restrictions don’t work.
But just as Democrats don’t let Republicans decide their candidates, policies or record, they don’t let the GOP decide which city hosts the Democratic National Convention this week. Holding the party’s big event in Chicago is a more polite way of expressing the message of the T-shirts above. It’s a way of saying that Chicago isn’t what Republicans want everyone to believe.
Let’s start with crime, specifically homicide. Is Chicago worse off than any other American city? Yes. But only two cities in the country—New York and Los Angeles—are larger than Chicago. In fact, Chicago, with a population of 2.7 million, has more people than 15 American states. In December, Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, ignored data showing that Louisiana has the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country when he called Chicago “America’s biggest outdoor shooting range.”
“Chicago has the most of everything just because it has the largest population,” Jeff Asher of data analytics research firm AH Datalytics said in a phone interview Thursday. “In terms of (crime) rates, Chicago is typically outside the top 10 in terms of murder and violent crime.”
“Memphis; St. Louis; New Orleans; Birmingham, Alabama; Detroit,” he said when asked to name the most violent cities in the country. “Detroit probably has the lowest number of murders since the early 1960s. It still has a high murder rate. New Orleans has seen a 40% decrease in murders compared to 2022. It still has a reasonably high murder rate, so that hasn’t changed.”
All over the world, people talk about Chicago. Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison. That's true.
Donald Trump in Chicago in 2019
But the focus remains on Chicago. Less than a week after taking office, Trump tweeted: “If Chicago does not fix the horrific ‘carnage’ that is happening, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 fatalities (up 24% from 2016), I will send in Federal Troopers!”
In late 2019, when he finally made his first presidential visit to Chicago, he said of the city: “It’s an embarrassment to us as a nation. All over the world, they talk about Chicago. Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison. That’s true.”
“I think Chicago has problems, but it’s also following trends everywhere else. It’s not the only place that has problems,” Asher said, adding that like many other American cities, “homicides spiked in Chicago in 2020 and 2021, and then they’ve been steadily declining since then.”
In general, Americans have become poor judges of how serious crime is.
“There used to be a relationship between crime prevalence and perception,” Asher says, “but I don’t think that relationship exists anymore. I think people have created in their minds a situation where either crime is up or the data is wrong.” In the 1990s, people’s feelings about crime “closely matched” the amount of crime. “Since then, the percentage of people who told Gallup that crime was up has been above 50 percent, regardless of which direction crime went that year.”
This is not to misrepresent Chicago as less violent than it actually is. One would hope that Chicago were as safe as more populous New York City. But Americans misjudge actual crime levels in part because Republicans want them to misjudge them. They need to exaggerate crime levels to make political points—because the actual data says otherwise.
Even New York is a crime-ridden hellhole in the Republican imagination.
I say I wish Chicago were as safe as New York, but even New York is a crime-ridden hellscape in the Republican imagination. While visiting the city to show support for a former Republican president who is on trial for 34 felonies, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told Fox News: “The streets are dirty, they’re full of people dying from drugs. They can’t even stand up. They’re falling over. There’s so much crime in the city. I can’t understand how people live there.”
An October report by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzed 2020-22 data from the FBI and other sources and found that the murder rate per 100,000 people was highest in the South (8.0) and lowest in the Northeast (4.5). New York (with 5.3 murders per 100,000) was far less deadly than Atlanta, where Green was shot countless times and apparently never killed. Atlanta, according to Brennan, had 33.9 murders per 100,000 people.
Republican hostility toward America’s big cities intensified during Ronald Reagan’s White House, and it seems never to have abated. In the Republican Party’s imagination, every big city, especially one run by a Democrat, is a source of fear.
If Republicans want to present Chicago as the embodiment of urban America—that is, dangerous and scary—it is important for Democrats to embrace Chicago to show that what happens in our cities matters to them, and that our country cannot succeed if our cities are abandoned.
The “Shut Up Chicago” shirts were designed by Anthony Hall, owner of the clothing company Harebrained. Hall says he got the idea after a friend alerted him to a Fox News segment in which a reporter asked people in Naperville, Illinois — an hour’s drive from Chicago — what they thought of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s swearing-in. That friend, Chicago marketer Matt Lindner, told Block Club Chicago that “Chicago has been a punching bag for people of a certain political persuasion.”
Chicagoans know the city has problems, he said, “but if you’re simply creating a narrative that the city is a war zone without being constructive about the solutions or how there are good people working on them, then, well, look at the shirt.”
