New research finds small, mid-size Illinois cities have higher per-capita gun homicide rates than Chicago
New research finds small, mid-size Illinois cities have higher per-capita gun homicide rates than Chicago
By Kaitlin Washburn May 8, 2023, 6:11pm CDT
Small and mid-sized Illinois cities have surpassed Chicago’s gun homicide rate in recent years, mirroring a national trend, a new analysis of city-level firearm violence data found.
Magic Wade, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, studied firearm homicide and injury data from the Gun Violence Archive for small, mid-size and large cities nationwide from 2015 to 2021.
“There’s a cluster of cities in Illinois that have gun homicide rates that are actually higher than Chicago’s, or they’re close to it,” Wade said.
“What’s been a big change is in cities like Rockford and Peoria. Both of those cities went from having about 12 per 100,000 in 2015 to Rockford having 17 per 100,000 in 2020. And Peoria had nearly 25 per 100,000.” she said.
Wade also found that Champaign’s rate in 2021 was 18 gun homicides per 100,000 people in 2021, and Chicago’s rate was 15 per 100,000 people the same year.
She also found that 2019 was a turning point for elevated gun violence rates before the nationwide spikes in 2020 and 2021.
“The pandemic accelerated a trend that was already happening,” Wade said. “After 2019 and through 2021 average rates of fatal and non-fatal shootings only increased across all city-size groups. This shows a broad trend of increasing gun violence that started in 2019, accelerated in 2020 and continued in 2021.”