EUROPEAN CITIES are awash with knife-wielding rude boys who will stab you just to snatch your phone. America is full of gun-toting gangsters and rogue ICE agents. Such clichés are common on social media—each side of the Atlantic Ocean thinks the other is lawless.
Evidence and Data
In 2024 it had 587 homicides, a rate of 22 per 100,000 residents, or 2.7 times that of the next-worst offender, Los Angeles. The average rate among ten European cities is 1.7 per 100,000 people. Murder or, more precisely, homicide (which includes manslaughter) is an imperfect measure of street safety: you are most likely to be killed by someone you know. But it is the statistic that travels best across borders, since a dead body is a dead body. On this basis, Chicago is by far the most deadly city in the data.
