* 8/18/26 - A City that Works - In Chicago, only 9% of shootings result in an arrest..............
Buzz Sawyer
"Chicago appears to be uniquely bad at this
Few police departments are good at solving these cases, but Chicago appears to be uniquely bad. In 2024, Chicago’s 9% arrest-rate clearance rate for non-fatal shootings was less than a third of the national average of 34%.
We’re also worse than most of our big city peers. According to a review by the Marshall Project, in 2022 Denver, Colorado led the way amongst big cities with a 53% clearance rate of non-fatal shootings. New York was second at 41%. Meanwhile, Chicago was at the bottom of the cities reviewed, with a clearance rate of just 9%.
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Source: Marshall Project
Again, this understates the problem. Because Chicago tends to rely much more heavily on ‘exceptional clearances’ than other cities, our 9% significantly inflates the actual share of non-fatal shootings cleared by arrests. When you strip out the 77 ‘exceptional clearances,’ Chicago’s arrest rate for non-fatal shootings in 2022 was just 7.2%.²
In Chicago, only 9% of shootings result in an arrestA plan to solve more shootings
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A few months ago, we wrote about Chicago’s poor record of solving murders: in 2025, only 33% of homicides in Chicago actually ended in an arrest. That’s a disaster for a number of reasons. Not only are far too many murders going unpunished, but by ‘clearing’ a large number of homicides without ever making an arrest, the Mayor and Police Department are hiding the ball on just how bad we’re really performing. But homicides aren’t the only crime we should care about. So I submitted a Freedom Of Information Act request to figure out how many non-fatal shootings a year Chicago Police clear – and what share of those clearances actually involve arrests. The numbers aren’t pretty. Between 2001 and 2025, the arrest rate for non-fatal shootings in Chicago has averaged just 9% per year. During the pandemic, arrest rates dropped to as low as 5% before rebounding to 11% last year. CPD is also writing off almost as many cases via ‘exceptional means’ (such as when a perpetrator is deemed to be dead already, or the State’s Attorney’s Office declines to prosecute a case). Historically, 7% of cases have been cleared through that path. Chicago only makes arrests in 5-13% of non-fatal shootings Clearances for non-fatal shootings by type, 2005-2025  This still understates the problem. First, it only counts shootings where an individual was hit – if a gunman fired and missed altogether, it wouldn’t be included in this data. And unlike homicides, which are generally reported very accurately, surveys indicate that just 40% of violent crimes are reported to police. That means that there are likely far more shooting victims in Chicago that never came forward in the first place. After all, if the police aren’t going to make an arrest anyway, what’s the point? This is bad for a few reasons. Not only do victims of violence deserve closure, but actually solving crimes is an important part of how a police department rebuilds trust with residents. Solving more shootings would also likely help drive down violence in the city over the medium term. Researchers have struggled to tease out the deterrent effect of higher clearance rates, but in Chicago we know that a very small number of individuals commit a large share of the shootings. Getting just a few of them off the streets could make a major difference in public safety. Shootings also often set off cycles of retaliatory violence, which could be interrupted if perpetrators are caught quickly. It’s also worth remembering that almost every shooting is an attempted murder – the perpetrator just missed, or the victim got timely medical care. Catching these offenders before they learn to aim presents one of our better opportunities to reduce homicides going forward.¹ Chicago appears to be uniquely bad at this Few police departments are good at solving these cases, but Chicago appears to be uniquely bad. In 2024, Chicago’s 9% arrest-rate clearance rate for non-fatal shootings was less than a third of the national average of 34%. We’re also worse than most of our big city peers. According to a review by the Marshall Project, in 2022 Denver, Colorado led the way amongst big cities with a 53% clearance rate of non-fatal shootings. New York was second at 41%. Meanwhile, Chicago was at the bottom of the cities reviewed, with a clearance rate of just 9%.
Source: Marshall Project Again, this understates the problem. Because Chicago tends to rely much more heavily on ‘exceptional clearances’ than other cities, our 9% significantly inflates the actual share of non-fatal shootings cleared by arrests. When you strip out the 77 ‘exceptional clearances,’ Chicago’s arrest rate for non-fatal shootings in 2022 was just 7.2%.² Other cities do not do this at the same rates. Data for 2022 isn’t available publicly, but in 2025, New York reported just 6 ‘exceptional clearances’ across all crime categories. That means its 42.6% reported clearance rate in 2025 is an actual reflection of its arrest rate, rather than an exercise in aggressive stat padding. A City That Works is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. We’re dealing with a capacity problem There’s nothing special about shootings that makes them particularly hard to solve. In fact, because these cases all come with a live witness (the victim), these cases should generally be easier to solve than homicides.³ The problem is that police departments don’t prioritize them. In Boston, researchers found that clearance rates for homicides and non-fatal shootings are similar in the first 48 hours after an incident, but then fall off much faster for non-fatal shootings as detectives are routed elsewhere. We see this pattern in Chicago as well. As noted in an excellent Sun-Times article last year, non-fatal shootings are quickly deprioritized by CPD. The Matrix Consulting study published earlier this year put some numbers behind that reporting: detectives spend an average of 270 hours per case on each homicide, but just 50 hours per case for non-fatal shootings. The results are predictable. CPD consistently makes arrests in 100-200 non-fatal shootings per year, regardless of the overall number of shootings committed. When shootings go up (as they did in 2016 and 2020), an even larger share go unprosecuted – contributing to a broader breakdown in public safety. Chicago consistently makes arrests in just 100-200 shootings per year, regardless of overall rates of violence Non-fatal shootings by clearance type, 2005-2025  Three solutions to boost arrest rates This fact pattern leads to some pretty straightforward solutions. First, Chicago needs to dedicate more detective time to solving non-fatal shootings. Based on the Matrix analysis, detectives should be spending 4-5x the time and effort on non-fatal shootings as they are today. Any efforts to civilianize more roles and/or hire more officers needs to make this role a priority.⁴ If we do so, we can expect some pretty quick results. When Denver attacked non-fatal shootings with the same resources as fatal ones, clearance rates jumped up from one in six to over 50%. The Boston Police Department has accomplished something similar. Notably, in February of last year CPD told the Sun-Times that it was trying to do something similar, but absent a meaningful increase in detective headcount, it’s hard to see where those resources would come from. Second, we need to continue to lean into technology investments to improve the productivity of detectives. Research on CPD’s Area Technology Centers indicated they delivered meaningful improvements in homicide clearance rates even as violence spiked during the pandemic. Continued investments in cameras and license plate readers would likely make a big difference. Better software to process those inputs would also help. Per the Matrix analysis, the average homicide case requires CPD to review 60 hours of video, and the average non-fatal shooting requires 6.⁵ Artificial Intelligence is not a magic wand for solving our city’s problems, but there are plenty of off-the-shelf tools that are quite good at processing large volumes of video and tagging moments for better review. That could free up significant time and might encourage detectives to source more video footage in the first place. Finally, we should extend some progress CPD has made to homicide investigations to non-fatal shootings. This has been a below the radar story in recent years, but the Department has been working to implement a series of recommendations made by the Police Executive Research Forum and Department of Justice back in 2018. One of those changes, codified in the last CPD contract, ensures the same detective consistently works a homicide from the get-go. We’ll spend more time on those changes, but they appear to be a success so far. Treating non-fatal shootings with a similar level of care and consistency would likely deliver improvements to clearance rates as well. This is a solvable problem There is rarely ‘one weird trick’ to address the problems Chicago faces. But in this case, there is also no one single villain or entrenched political actor blocking a series of systemwide changes, either. CPD wants better numbers, detectives want to solve crimes, and other actors in the system - including the police union - have been open to prior reforms. Solving more shootings won’t come easy, but we can fix this problem with focused effort and a limited amount of additional resourcing. In the process, Chicago could give more victims closure, rebuild trust in our police force, and deliver safer communities in the long run. That’s exactly the sort of reform a future Mayor and Police Superintendent should prioritize. Thanks for reading A City That Works! This post is public so feel free to share it. 1 It also means that the offender catches an attempted murder charge instead of later being tagged with a much longer sentence for murder one. If you care about reducing the number of Americans behind bars in the long run, this might be one of the more sustainable ways to do so. 2 There is a slight discrepancy between the 9% clearance rate reported here and 11% rate reported at the beginning of this article. My guess is that some additional shootings in 2022 where cleared between today and when this article was written in 2023. 3 Some of those victims are less cooperative than others, of course. But last I checked, most corpses weren’t particularly cooperative either. 4 At a minimum! Given our abysmal arrest rates for fatal shootings, we should also be working harder to solve those as well. 5 Again – no reason that we should expect a non-fatal shooting to have less useful video than a fatal one. This is simply a question of effort and resource prioritization. You're currently a free subscriber to A City That Works. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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