Fed up with the repeated condemnations of their city — condemnations that are regularly uttered by former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party and Fox News — a few enterprising Chicagoans encapsulated their rage on T-shirts last year. “Shut the f— up about Chicago,” one of those shirts reads. “You don’t live here.”
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.
Don’t count on Republicans heeding that advice. 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.
But just as Democrats aren’t letting Republicans define their candidates, their policies or their record, they’re not letting the GOP define the city hosting this week’s Democratic National Convention. Throwing the party’s big party in Chicago is a more polite way of expressing the message on the T-shirts mentioned above. It is a way of saying that Chicago isn’t what Republicans want everybody else to believe it is.
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.”
“Memphis; St. Louis; New Orleans; Birmingham, Alabama; Detroit,” he said when asked to name the most violent cities in the country. “Detroit is probably going to have the fewest murders since the early ’60s. Still has a high murder rate. New Orleans has seen a 40% reduction in murder relative to 2022. Still has a reasonably high murder rate, so that hasn’t changed.”
But the emphasis stays on Chicago. Less than a week into his term as president, Trump tweeted, “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!”
In late 2019, when he finally made his first presidential visit to Chicago, he said of the city, “It’s embarrassing to us as a nation. All over the world, they’re talking about Chicago. Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison. It’s true.”
“I think Chicago has issues,” Asher said, “but it’s also generally following the trends everywhere else. And it’s not the only place with issues.” Like so many other American cities, he said, in Chicago “murder rose substantially in 2020, 2021, and then has been coming down steadily ever since.”
Generally speaking, Americans have become awful judges of how bad crime is.
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.”
My intent here is not to misrepresent Chicago as less violent than it is. One wishes Chicago were as safe as the much more populated New York City. But Americans misperceive actual levels of crime in part because Republicans want them to misperceive it. They need to hype crime levels to make the political points they want to make — 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 hellhole in the Republican imagination. While visiting the city to show support for a former Republican president on trial for 34 felony counts, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told Fox News, “The streets are filthy, they’re covered with people basically dying on drugs. They can’t even stand up. They’re falling over. There’s so much crime in the city. I can’t comprehend how people live there.” An October report from the Brennan Center for Justice crunched 2020-2022 data from the FBI and other sources and found that the murder rate per 100,000 people is highest in the South (8.0) and lowest in the Northeast (4.5). And that New York (with 5.3 murders per 100,000 people) was far less deadly than Atlanta, where Greene has been an untold number of times and apparently not been killed. Atlanta, according to Brennan, had 33.9 murders per 100,000 people. The Republican animosity for big American cities intensified during Ronald Reagan’s time in the White House, and it seems never to have let up. In the GOP imagination, every big city, especially if it’s run by a Democrat, is terrifying. If Republicans want to proffer Chicago as the epitome of urban America, meaning dangerous and frightening, then it’s important for Democrats to embrace Chicago to show that what happens in our cities matters to them, and that our country can’t succeed if our cities are forsaken. The “Shut the f— up about Chicago” T-shirts were created by Anthony Hall, the owner of the clothing company Harebrained. Hall says he was inspired after a friend alerted him to a Fox News segment where a correspondent asked people in Naperville, Illinois — an hour’s drive from Chicago — their opinion of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson being sworn into office. That friend, Chicago marketer Matt Lindner, told Block Club Chicago that “Chicago has been the punching bag for people of certain political persuasions.” Chicagoans know the city has problems, he said, “but if you’re simply creating the narrative that it’s a war zone without being constructive about solutions or how there’s good people working on it, then,” well, see the T-shirt.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
