Was Fox News host Brett Baier correct when he declared Chicago has "the highest murder rate of all the big cities" during an interview with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker? Yes, if you compare US cities with official populations over 1 million. Pritzker asserted Chicago ranks below 30th, but did not provide a citation for that number. Lead Stories found that some murder rate comparisons include cities like Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Detroit, New Orleans and St. Louis, all of which have a higher murder rate than Chicago's, but fewer than 1 million residents.
Baier's claim that Chicago was worst originated in a live interview that was quoted across social media, including an October 23, 2025 post on X (archived here) on the @greg_price11 account, with text that began "Baier: "Why does Chicago have the highest murder rate of all the big cities?". It continued:
Pritzker: "We're not in the top 30."
Here's what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of X.com post at @greg_price11.)
The post includes a short excerpt from the Pritzker interview in which Baier and Pritzker argue over Chicago's murder rate and Fox producers display the map (above):
Baier: Why does Chicago have the highest murder rate of all the big cities?
Pritzker: Well, we are not in the top 30 in terms of our murder rate. Indeed, Our murder rate has been cut in half over the last four years and every year it's gone down by double digits and if you look at all of the violent crime over the last four years...they've all gone down
Baier: Here's a map most populous US cities 17.47 per 100,000 population Chicago's number one over Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego.
Pritzker: What I'm explaining to you is
Baier: Now, you're talking about violent crime.
Pritzker: Look, you can pull statistics up; I can, too.
Baier: No, no, these are murders
Pritzker: I'm explaining to you that our murder rate has been cut in half and very importantly Brett, and you gotta hear this very importantly we've been doing the things that are necessary to bring crime down right we've invested in community violence interruption we've invested in police
Neither Baier nor Pritzker cite the source of their statistics and the Fox map does not say where the designer got the data.
Lead Stories found several rankings of the murder rates of U.S. cities, in which Chicago's rank depends on which cities you include. Also, the size of cities depends on methods of counting. The Atlanta Regional Commission, for example (archived here), pegs greater Atlanta's population at 5.28 million, while the official population of the city of Atlanta itself is just 542,000, and was not included in Fox's map, despite a worse murder rate than Chicago's.
Rochester Institute of Technology
A Rochester Institute of Technology study, "2024 Homicide Statistics for 24 U.S. Cities" (archived here) places Chicago 8th-worst, behind smaller cities like St. Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot, with highlighting added by Lead Stories, of chart in "2024 Homicide Statistics for 24 U.S. Cities")
Using FBI data and other reports, the RIT researchers found that among cities larger than 1 million, Chicago's is the highest murder rate.
USA Facts
At USA Facts, a non-partisan government data publisher, murder rates are calculated based on the home county, since city borders may be less meaningful when urban growth fills in around the downtown. Using that approach, here's what USA Facts found:
Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago and its metropolitan area, had 805 homicides in 2023 -- the most in the nation. The second highest was Los Angeles County, California, whose 88 cities, including Los Angeles, had 659 homicides.
Los Angeles and Cook Counties are also the two most populated counties in the country. When adjusted for population, Cook County's 15.8 homicides per 100,000 people ranked 17th among 63 large-central metro US counties with reliable data, and Los Angeles County's 6.8 ranked 37th.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of chart at https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-murder-rates.)
FBI Crime Data Explorer
The FBI Crime Data Explorer website is a public portal for the data passed to the FBI by cities across the country. Lead Stories downloaded the FBI's latest (2024) city-by-city comparison chart, stripped out smaller cities and came up with approximately the same ranking Fox News did, which shows Chicago with the worst murder rate of U.S. cities bigger than 1 million population. Lead Stories calculated the same rate per 100,000 that Baier cited to Pritzker: 17.47.
(Image source: Lead Stories data chart using data extracted from FBI CIUS Table 8.)
