CHICAGO — As President Donald Trump has recently threatened to send federal troops to clean up Chicago’s violence, local officials have trumpeted a factor complicating his plans: Crime is down in the city.

It’s a feather in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s cap that he has highlighted as a political win all year, but one that’s become especially salient as the White House has suggested again and again that Chicago could be next in Trump’s military crackdown of major cities.

A surge of immigration agents in Chicago, dubbed “Midway Blitz” by the White House, began last week before Trump said Friday he would send the National Guard to Memphis, Tennessee, with the blessing of its Democratic mayor. But his ongoing obsession with Chicago as a “hellhole” places the truth of its notorious gun violence problem at the heart of a national fight.

Even as Johnson qualifies the latest gains by saying more work must be done to address violence, his effort to counter naysayers by reciting declines may not be as clear-cut a political win as it appears. Chicagoans in many neighborhoods still feel unsafe, and critics contend he’s simply the beneficiary of a nationwide trend in violence reduction.

Still, the freshman mayor has been eager to try to parlay the success into a broader argument that progressive leadership works — despite earlier fears over Johnson’s past endorsement of the “defund the police” movement.

“Think about what people said would happen if you elected a progressive,” Johnson said this month during a live interview with Politico Illinois. “You all were there. They said that there’s going to be a mass exodus with our police department. Literally, people said there was going to be blood in the streets. When I read some of this stuff, I’m like, ‘Who do they think they’re electing here?’ I mean, I’m Brandon, a middle school teacher. I’m not some freak of nature.”

Indeed, the number of people shot in Chicago this year has been cut almost in half compared with the same point in 2022, the last full year before Johnson took office, according to the city’s violence reduction dashboard. And as city’s pandemic-era crime spike ebbs, the numbers of people killed, shot, robbed, carjacked have all dropped about 30% in the last year alone, police data shows.

The president’s first public musings over sending the military to Chicago sparked a frenzy among local Democrats who sought to push back on his narrative that crime in the nation’s third-largest city was out of control and required federal intervention. But Trump appears to have not paid much mind to Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker’s dogged messaging on Chicago’s strides in reducing violence.

“We can move fast and stop this madness,” Trump wrote Sept. 8 on Truth Social. “The City and State have not been able to do the job. People of Illinois should band together and DEMAND PROTECTION. IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE!!! ACT NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!”

By Friday, Trump had pivoted, but not because of the violence numbers. He appeared on Fox News and said Chicago — where’s it’s “hostile, by the way the people will greet us” and where “they have professional agitators” — would not see the National Guard, while he insisted the violence here would make such a deployment appropriate.

The president’s vacillations come as even some local skeptics are reluctant to credit Johnson for the recent progress. They point to how all major U.S. cities saw a crime spike following the coronavirus pandemic and civil unrest that has since begun reversing.

Garien Gatewood, Johnson’s deputy mayor for community safety, countered that Chicago’s homicides could see a 60-year low, a change he attributes in part to Johnson’s policies. An influx of National Guard troops could harm the careful work by Chicago police and others to strengthen the community relationships he says are paramount to solving street conflicts.

“Fear leads to rash decisions,” Gatewood said. “We don’t need rash decisions.”

The stark contrast in outlooks coming from the White House and City Hall is to be expected in today’s divisive political climate, where ragging on Chicago is red meat to Trump’s base just as much as mocking the president plays to Johnson’s leftist supporters.

But it also reflects the enduring complexity of Chicago’s violence epidemic, which harks back to Johnson himself invoking the “tale of two cities” throughout his mayoral campaign.

Chicago leads the nation in total homicides but ranks eighth when adjusted per capita, according to a report this year from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Yet it frequently sees more annual murders than New York City and Los Angeles combined and has the highest homicide rate among U.S. cities above 1 million in population.

One study from 2022 found that young men in Chicago’s most violent ZIP codes were more likely to be shot and killed than soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The rebuttals to Johnson and Pritzker often seek to drive a wedge between those communities and the political establishment.

“Just last week, Gov. Pritzker stood on the Riverwalk and said there was no crisis in Chicago,” Illinois House Republicans posted on X after the governor arrived at an anti-Trump news conference downtown via a water taxi on the Chicago River. “Over the weekend, 50+ people were shot across the city.”

Despite the largely cool reception locally to a potential federal troop deployment, the Trump administration has also tried to strike a nerve by highlighting local headlines about recent shootings and interviews with South and West siders who still feel unsafe.

Chrischauna Smith, 24, is one such Chicagoan who has lost family to gun violence. She was also incarcerated at 12 after fatally shooting someone she believed was involved in her brother’s murder, she said.

“I got shot when I was 6, and that’s what made me like guns,” Smith said. “I felt like that’s all I knew. And it took me a little while to understand this is not what you want.”

Smith is now a participant in Chicago CRED (Creating Real Economic Destiny), a large antiviolence organization founded by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The program pays participants a stipend to meet with therapists, case managers, job coaches and other mentors as part of its philosophy that violence interruption starts with offering a better path for those most at risk of being a victim or perpetrator.

It is hopeful journeys like hers that the Johnson administration believes are the key to tackling the “root causes” of crime.

Though CRED doesn’t currently receive city funding, Johnson’s team said spending more on similar street outreach groups has helped stem the city’s persistent gang conflicts. Other initiatives the mayor cites are scaling up the city’s youth jobs program to over 30,000 this summer and expanding the city’s mental health services. These priorities are an extension of Johnson’s larger philosophy that crime cannot be solved with policing alone and requires — as he often puts it — “investing in people.”

This stance caused Johnson much grief during the 2023 mayoral race, when one of the leading attacks against him was that he was anti-police and soft on crime. One such detractor was Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara, who predicted “blood in the streets.”

Reached for comment last week on the mayor’s crime record so far, Catanzara said, “That’s not worth my time.”

Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost to Johnson, declined to judge her successor’s record. “I ran against the guy, and I pointed out at that time what I thought were failings,” she said.

She said the extraordinary challenges during her tenure allowed her opponents to play into “people’s worst fears, irrationality” to make the case that Chicago’s crime-fighting strategies were not working.

“I’m reminded of the old expression: ’Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan,'” Lightfoot said in a phone interview. “People believe that the mayor of Chicago is all powerful and that we can move mountains to solve community problems … but the tension between the immediate need to make it stop and what you’re actually capable of doing is one that is really tough to reconcile.”

There are about 11,500 sworn members of the Chicago Police Department as of last month, according to the Office of the Inspector General’s dashboard. That’s a decline of about 200 cops since Johnson took office in May 2023, mirroring a larger trend of attrition in law enforcement.

At its peak staffing in 2019, CPD had more than 13,300 sworn officers.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s campaign promise to add 200 more detectives remains unfulfilled, with current ranks stuck at the 1,100 level from the start of his term. But his team has since clarified his commitment was to promote and hire additional detectives, even if overall staffing levels haven’t improved.

Still, after topping 800 homicides in 2021, Chicago is poised to meet Johnson’s early goal this year to get below 500 murders, with some even speculating that getting below 400 is in reach. If that comes to pass, the mayor will surely argue that he has proved his doubters wrong.

But Ald. Matthew O’Shea, 19th, who represents a large population of first responders on the Southwest Side, cast doubt on the efficacy of violence interruption programs while making sure to boost the approach of new Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Niell Burke and Johnson’s handpicked Chicago police Superintendet Larry Snelling.

O’Shea rattled off a list of his constituents’ concerns over carjackings and robberies just in the last week. He wants Johnson to more forcefully call out violence and pledge to track down and prosecute perpetrators.

“There’s crime statistics, and then there’s the perception of crime,” O’Shea said. “When elected officials say ‘crime is down’ as if it’s a victory lap, to the victims and the communities where this is happening, they don’t feel that.”

Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, dismissed Johnson’s role as well: “What you’re seeing now is a trend of crime coming back down that has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re doing different in Chicago. … To try to take credit for something in a short window, I think it’s doing a disservice.”

Other critics have alleged that the reported drop in crime is caused by changes in how police input data, a charge Snelling has staunchly rejected.

Some law enforcement experts caution against attributing short-term progress to any one policy — or mayor, for that matter, as crime waves are often cyclical. After Chicago’s gun violence hit levels not seen in a quarter century, it was inevitable that numbers would fall back down eventually, experts said.

Charlie Beck, a former interim Chicago police superintendent, said “the pendulum swung too far” after a period of intense scrutiny on law enforcement following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Johnson tapping Snelling — a traditional cop’s cop — was the right signal to turn the page on that chapter, Beck said.

“If by and large, (officers) feel that the city and their leadership won’t support them when they’re right and they stop doing their jobs, that has a significant impact,” Beck said. “You cannot take that away from Mayor Johnson, picking the right person and then letting them do their job without micromanagement.”

Indeed, Johnson’s relationship with Snelling has been more hands-off compared with the dynamic between their predecessors, Lightfoot and her top cop, David Brown. Snelling has at times broken with the mayor on issues such as shutting off the city’s ShotSpotter gun detection devices, but the two have carefully avoided public disagreement.

Kimberley Smith, director of national programs at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, said the national decline signals “macro-factors” may be behind the local drop. More people — and more eyes — are back on city streets, deterring crime. But some local policies are also backed up by initial research. For instance, violence intervention gives Chicagoans long-term skills to “self-de-escalate” and lower violence where they have been studied, she said.

Federal stimulus money allowed governments and nonprofits to try a barrage of novel ways to bring down crime. But the last of that money is set to dry up this year, on top of the Trump administration’s intention to slash antiviolence funding, and leaders and researchers are still “flying blind” in determining what exactly worked in the short period crime has dropped, she said.

“These funds are going away, and we still don’t know what combination of things to keep,” she said. “We know some things. We don’t know a lot of things.”

In his next budget, Johnson will face pressure from his progressive base to maintain and even expand investments in nonpolicing safety efforts. His opposition will likely be just as sensitive to attempts to slash Chicago police spending.

One grassroots campaign building early momentum is calling on the mayor to eliminate funding for around 1,000 vacant CPD officer positions. The move would free up $300 million to pay for policies like more youth jobs and an expanded system of unarmed first responders for mental health emergencies, the coalition behind the effort says.

Asha Ransby-Sporn, an organizer backing the effort with the Chicago Black Voter Project, said her team has knocked on over 40,000 South and West Side doors to make the case the best way to support public safety is to take a step back from policing and take a more holistic approach.

“It is so much deeper than a year-by-year, weekend-by-weekend thing,” she said. “If we’re only ever measuring this situation by the worst thing that can happen in a community, then our frame is pretty narrow.”

Chrischauna Smith, the woman participating in the CRED antiviolence program, said she enrolled at Harold Washington College this year and plans to study psychology so she can help others with how to process trauma, too. She wants leaders opining on Chicago’s enduring violence to understand that there are countless others who also want to escape the life they’ve known.

“If I didn’t have this program, I’ll tell you the truth, I’ll probably be in jail right now or I’ll probably be dead,” Smith said.

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