Shootings tick up in Q1

Chicago opened 2026 with more shootings than the same stretch of 2025, breaking a run of year-over-year declines that had become one of the city’s clearest crime trends. The shift showed up in first-quarter numbers through March 31, even after 2025 finished with Chicago’s fewest murders since 1965. (chicagotribune.com) (abc7chicago.com) That matters because 2025 had set a very low recent baseline. Chicago police said the city logged 1,471 shooting incidents in 2025, down from 2,274 in 2024, and 1,847 shooting victims, down from 2,797 a year earlier. (abc7chicago.com) By early January, city leaders were already pointing to 416 murders in 2025 as the lowest annual total since 395 murders in 1965. That gave Mayor Brandon Johnson and Superintendent Larry Snelling a simple public story: fewer killings, fewer shootings, and a city moving in the right direction. (abc7chicago.com 1) (abc7chicago.com 2) Now the first quarter has complicated that story. The new increase is described as citywide rather than concentrated in downtown, which means the headline is less about one tourist corridor and more about whether a broad decline has stalled. (chicagotribune.com) Chicago has lived through this before: one set of numbers improves, but public confidence lags behind. On January 2, 2026, ABC 7 quoted security executive Anthony Riccio saying the statistics and the feeling of safety “will never marry up,” even after the city’s 60-year homicide low. (abc7chicago.com) That gap between numbers and perception is one reason a modest first-quarter rise gets attention fast. A resident may hear “citywide uptick” and think about the block outside their house, while a person in another state may hear “Chicago shootings up” and picture the whole city getting worse at once. (abc7chicago.com) (chicagotribune.com) The background here is that Chicago’s recent drop was never explained by one switch being flipped. ABC 7’s January reporting cited the University of Chicago Crime Lab saying violent crime was falling in many big cities at the same time, while local officials pointed to police deployments, community partnerships, youth jobs, and violence-interruption programs. (abc7chicago.com) That also means a reversal does not automatically point to one failed policy. The same January report noted concerns that cuts in federal dollars for community violence intervention programs could make it harder to keep the decline going in 2026. (abc7chicago.com) The city’s own data system shows why people watch these shifts so closely. Chicago’s 2026 crime dataset is updated daily by the Chicago Police Department, and the city’s public shootings datasets let reporters and residents track whether a bad month is an outlier or the start of a new pattern. (data.cityofchicago.org 1) (data.cityofchicago.org 2) So the first-quarter story is not that Chicago erased the gains of 2025 in three months. It is that after a year with 416 murders and a one-third drop in shooting incidents, even a small increase in early 2026 is enough to put public safety back at the center of the city’s politics and reputation. (abc7chicago.com) (chicagotribune.com)