The Crime Narrative Isn’t About Crime
Why Chicago is the mask, not the hand behind it
Every weekend, Chicago’s body count makes the news. Six dead, 24 wounded, the numbers blasted in all caps across Trump’s feed, repeated on cable like a drumbeat. It’s predictable, almost ritual. The city becomes shorthand for collapse: crime out of control, society unraveling, America in freefall.
But here’s the truth they bury under the noise: crime is down. Not just in Chicago… Across the country. Homicides and shootings have dropped below pre-pandemic levels. Most major cities are safer today than they were a decade ago. The fear, though, is louder than the facts. And fear is the point.
Chicago isn’t the crime capital of America. It’s a symbol, chosen to play the villain in a story about urban decay and Democratic failure. The mask. And like every mask, what matters isn’t the paint on the front but the hand holding it up. The real story isn’t about Chicago at all. It’s about how power uses fear, how states set the rules, and how the failures run deeper than one city’s weekend tally.
Crime Is Down. That’s the Story You’re Not Supposed to Hear
The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) reports that for the first half of 2025:
Homicides dropped 17% compared to 2024, and 14% below 2019 levels.
Other major crimes followed suit: robbery down 30%, motor vehicle theft down 25%, and sexual assault down 28%.
Even the FBI confirms the trend: 2025 is on track for the lowest homicide rate in over a decade.
Chicago's Decline Is Even Deeper
Here in the city itself, the trend is sharper (and shorter headlines hide that):
Homicides down ~32%, shootings down ~39%, through mid-2025.
Overall violent crime has plummeted 21.6%, with multi-victim shootings down 44.6%, robberies down 32%, and carjackings down 51%.
That’s not a city unraveling.
It’s one turning a corner.
Chicago as Scapegoat
Every weekend’s body count makes Chicago the headline. It’s the ritual tweet, the cable chyron, the proof point for anyone who wants to argue America’s cities are collapsing.
But Chicago isn’t at the top of the charts. When you look at homicide rates per 100,000 residents, the cities more violent than Chicago include:
St. Louis
Baltimore
New Orleans
Birmingham
Detroit
Memphis
Cleveland
Kansas City
Indianapolis
Philadelphia
Chicago sits below them. So why does it get singled out? Because it’s useful. Because “Chicago” has become shorthand for Blackness, for urban decay, for Democratic failure. It’s less about crime than about narrative.
Blue Cities, Red States
The list tells the story, if you look close enough. St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, Indianapolis, Birmingham… all with homicide rates higher than Chicago. All inside Republican-controlled states.
That matters. Because in each of these cases, the state legislature sets the rules. Cities can’t pass stricter gun laws, can’t redirect state funds, can’t roll out reforms without hitting the wall of state preemption. Local leaders are left to manage crises with one hand tied, while governors and legislatures shift the blame back on the cities themselves.
Here are some of the clearest examples:
Missouri (St. Louis, Kansas City): The GOP legislature passed laws blocking cities from enforcing stricter gun ordinances. In fact, St. Louis and Kansas City can’t even require background checks at gun shows.
Louisiana (New Orleans): The state preempts nearly all local firearm regulation. New Orleans officials have pleaded for more control as homicide soared, but the legislature refuses.
Tennessee (Memphis): State law forbids cities from passing their own gun restrictions, even as Memphis struggles with one of the nation’s highest homicide rates. Instead, lawmakers pushed a “permitless carry” bill.
Indiana (Indianapolis): The state bans cities from regulating guns at all. Even the ability to ban weapons in city parks is stripped.
Alabama (Birmingham): State legislators not only preempt local gun laws but have repeatedly cut or redirected funds that could support violence prevention programs.
It’s a political loop:
Crime spikes in a blue city.
The red state government blocks local fixes.
The same government then weaponizes the numbers as proof of “Democratic failure.”
The irony? When you zoom out to the national map, many of the highest homicide rates are clustered in red states. But the story we’re told is that Chicago is the problem.
Red Cities, Red States
If the narrative were honest, it wouldn’t stop at Chicago, St. Louis, or New Orleans. Because Republican-run cities in Republican-run states struggle with crime too. The difference? Their problems rarely get weaponized in the national spotlight.
Tulsa, Oklahoma: Consistently ranks high in violent crime, especially shootings. The state legislature remains firmly Republican, yet Tulsa doesn’t trend as a symbol of “GOP collapse.”
Jacksonville, Florida: One of the largest GOP-led cities in the country, with homicide spikes that rival or exceed Chicago’s year to year. Still, it’s not used as shorthand for moral failure.
Fort Worth, Texas: Rising violent crime rates alongside rapid growth, but almost never framed as a crisis by the same voices pointing at Chicago.
Phoenix, Arizona (until recently Republican-run): Years of homicide increases, yet no MAGA rally cries about its safety.
The pattern repeats: when crime happens in a red city, it’s a local tragedy; when crime happens in a blue city, it’s a national talking point. That asymmetry isn’t accidental; it’s strategy.
Because the story was never about crime rates. It was about using crime as a wedge, a fear trigger, a way to pin urban disorder on opponents while ignoring the failures at home.
FIND MORE INFO ABOUT THIS:
https://usafacts.org/
Policy Failures: Beyond the Bullet Count
When the conversation gets stuck on shootings and weekend death tolls, the deeper failures slip by unnoticed. Not every crisis shows up in a homicide chart. Some are hidden in budgets, contracts, and broken logistics.
Los Angeles: The city poured billions into homelessness programs only to see a fraction reach the streets. Consultant fees ballooned, construction dragged, and units that were promised in months took years. The money existed, but the pipeline was clogged by middlemen, bureaucracy, and mismanagement. The narrative became one of progressive failure, but the reality was structural rot: a system designed to burn dollars faster than it houses people.
Washington, D.C.: The capital city has the opposite problem: overlapping jurisdictions. Local leaders answer to residents, but the federal government owns much of the land and dictates much of the policing. Add broken payment systems, staffing shortages, and a federal workforce stretched thin, and the result is paralysis. Residents see failure, but the machine keeps rolling, too big and too divided to respond quickly.
Jackson, Mississippi: In 2022 and again in 2023, the water system collapsed, leaving residents without safe drinking water for weeks. This wasn’t a sudden disaster. It was the result of decades of underinvestment and state neglect. Jackson, a majority-Black city, was left to beg for infrastructure dollars while the GOP-led state legislature blocked fixes and cut resources.
Houston, Texas: The nation’s fourth-largest city is drowning in floods, outages, and grid failures tied to a crumbling energy system. When the power grid failed in 2021, hundreds died in freezing homes. Billions in state-level bailouts followed, but instead of hardening infrastructure, much of the money flowed back to energy companies. Residents paid the price for deregulation and privatization sold as “efficiency.”
What ties these stories together is same disease: failure in logistics, not intent. Whether blue or red, the American system excels at writing checks but falters at delivery. Crime rates become the easy headline, but the real weakness of American governance is its inability to execute: to turn money, plans, and urgency into working systems.
The National Guard: Soldiers as Stagehands
When politicians want to look “tough on crime,” they call in the National Guard. Chicago, D.C., New York. We’ve seen it over and over. But the Guard is not a police force. They are not trained for civilian patrol, not paid for it, and not meant to be permanent fixtures in American streets.
Here’s the reality:
Overworked & underpaid:
Guardsmen are part-time soldiers, often juggling civilian jobs. They don’t receive the pay or benefits of full-time active duty, yet get thrown into high-risk deployments at the whim of governors or presidents.
Not their mission:
The Guard exists for emergencies (i.e. natural disasters, floods, hurricanes, true breakdowns of order). Using them for weekend crime stats is political theater, not public safety.
Morale collapse:
Years of being pulled from their jobs to serve as props in culture wars (from immigration crackdowns to city “crime patrols”) have left many Guardsmen burned out. Reports of high turnover and low recruitment are the visible cracks.
The Guard wasn’t built to police neighborhoods. But in the absence of policy that addresses root causes, they’re the fallback. Cheaper than fixing infrastructure, more visible than reform, and more useful to a press conference than to a community.
Like crime stats, the Guard is stagecraft. Real security can’t be conjured from fatigues on a street corner, but the illusion photographs well.
The Curtain and the Hand
When you put the pieces together, the story isn’t about crime at all. The numbers show decline. The charts show Chicago isn’t the epicenter. The maps show many of the most violent cities are bound by red-state governments. The budgets show failure isn’t about intent but logistics. The National Guard shows how quickly soldiers become stagehands when policy is replaced by theater.
Fear is the curtain. Crime stats shouted in all caps, Guardsmen in fatigues on street corners, headlines about “urban decay.” The system thrives when people mistake the curtain for the stage.
Chicago is the mask: chosen, painted, and held aloft. The hand behind it is the same one that blocks cities from fixing their own problems, guts services while demanding austerity, and reroutes public money into private gain.
The crime narrative isn’t about crime. It’s about control. About keeping fear louder than data, optics stronger than execution, theater more powerful than truth.
TOW
The machine feeds on the gap between what’s real and what’s said. The mask shifts, but the hand remains steady.
ETHER
Noise is the curtain. Power is the hand behind it. The mask is fear, but the truth bleeds through the cracks.
