Editor’s note: This story first appeared on The Daily Beast.
Chicago Police Department brass and their boss, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, are sure to be breathing a sigh of relief as they cruise through the final weeks of 2013 with fewer homicides on the books than last year.
Chicago logged 506 murders in 2012. That’s more than the nation’s two largest cities (New York and Los Angeles), and the number invited media attention that made people think that maybe Chicago, far from being a picturesque city for yuppies and tourists, was actually a good place to go only if you were looking to get shot.
With just three weeks until we close out the year, the homicide ticker is stuck on 401. That’s still almost a hundred more than New York, a city with over three times Chicago’s population, has had to date but it’s also the largest year-over-year drop in a decade, police department data show.
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