Collaboration with @NoLionNoBull
Chicago can show declining crime numbers and still have a serious violence problem.
Both things can exist at the same time, and understanding that requires looking deeper than whatever percentage happens to make the headline.
Crime statistics depend on what is being measured. Five people shot can represent one shooting incident but five shooting victims.
Reported crime depends on people actually making reports.
Homicides, shooting incidents, shooting victims and overall violent crime are separate measurements, and mixing those categories can produce a distorted picture of what is happening.
Gun violence is where the numbers become especially important. My reporting uses national shooting data to compare Chicago with other American cities, along with Chicago’s own police and violence data.
Looking at the raw records rather than somebody else’s interpretation has become increasingly important because the same dataset can tell very different stories depending on which number gets pulled from it.
Street reporting gives you another dataset altogether: what you actually see.
Several months were spent preparing a documentary about people living under Chicago bridges.
Other documentary filmmakers were ready to participate, and the plan was to divide the city geographically and spend time talking with homeless people about how they ended up there and what was happening around them.
One winter day near the former Blommer Chocolate factory changed those plans.
Several people were sitting together eating and talking when a man approached. He recognized http://SubX.News and wanted to know what was happening.
Then came the threat.
Leave or get shot.
Nobody nearby stepped in.
Looking around made it obvious there would not be much help if the situation escalated, so staying there to prove something made no sense.
I left.
Reporting from Chicago streets sometimes means being in places where most reporters are not going to spend much time.
It also means knowing the difference between documenting something and trying to become part of it.
A reporter is not a cop, not the government and not there to manufacture a confrontation for views.
That distinction matters more as independent journalism grows.
Traditional newspapers and television stations used to control most access to large audiences.
Social media broke much of that system apart, allowing somebody with a phone and an audience to publish information without waiting for an editor to approve it.
New gatekeepers replaced the old ones.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms can give an independent journalist enormous reach, but they also control access to that audience.
My original Facebook account was deactivated after personal activity, union work and reporting had all become mixed together on the same platform.
Losing an account teaches you quickly that independent media may own its reporting without owning its distribution.
Years before much of my current crime coverage, cameras were already documenting another Chicago story: gentrification and neighborhood abandonment.
Blocks that once contained homes became stretches of vacant land.
Buildings deteriorated next to properties maintained by people who had worked their entire lives.
Some residents had bought inexpensive homes decades earlier, paid them off and expected those houses to provide security later in life.
Then everything around them changed.
Abandoned property next door does not only hurt whoever owns the abandoned building. It hurts the homeowner who maintained his property.
It affects the block. It can depress property values, attract illegal activity and leave children walking past structures that should have been secured or demolished years earlier.
Government calls some of these changes redevelopment. Residents experience them house by house and block by block.
Young people grow up in the middle of those conditions, which is why youth engagement may be both Chicago’s biggest problem and its greatest opportunity.
Previous generations had clearer routes available. Sports were a route. Trades were a route. Work was a route. Education was a route.
Neighborhood organizations provided another route.
Too many young people do not see enough of those choices anymore.
Look at some of the kids society labels criminals and there is another side people miss. A teenager who can figure out how to defeat a complicated mechanical or electronic system in seconds has demonstrated intelligence and problem-solving ability.
Illegal behavior still has consequences, but simply calling that kid stupid or bad wastes the opportunity to understand what else that ability could accomplish.
Society has become very efficient at identifying what young people do wrong and much less effective at figuring out what they could do right.
Englewood shows what happens when an entire neighborhood becomes defined by its worst statistics.
People hear Englewood and immediately think shootings, killings and crime.
Missing from that picture are generations of working people, homeowners, businesses and families who built lives there.
Englewood did not simply wake up one morning and become what outsiders think it is today.
Understanding the neighborhood means understanding what happened to it.
Garfield Park and portions of the West Side deserve the same attention now.
Violence, vacant property, redevelopment and gentrification are happening alongside one another, and those forces will help determine what those neighborhoods look like years from now.
Politics cannot be separated from any of it.
Years spent around union organizing and campaigns provided an inside look at how political operations are built.
Candidates do not magically appear.
Organizations recruit people, develop campaigns, assemble coalitions, raise money and create the political machinery needed to put someone into office.
Being around that process also destroys some of the mythology surrounding politics.
Political labels matter less to me than records. Supporting labor or social justice does not require protecting politicians associated with those causes. Being critical of a Democrat does not suddenly make someone a Republican.
Reporting should not depend on which political team benefits from the information.
Receipts are receipts.
One issue cuts across crime, education, employment and politics: what happens to people after they enter the criminal justice system.
Punishment supposedly ends at some point. In reality, a criminal record can continue affecting employment, housing, education and other opportunities years later.
Someone makes a bad decision young, gets arrested, loses school opportunities, cannot get certain jobs and then encounters another closed door when trying to rebuild.
Accountability has to exist.
So does a way back.
Without both, society can spend enormous resources punishing people and almost nothing creating a realistic route for them to become productive afterward.
All of these issues eventually come back to the same place.
Your block.
Take care of where you live.
Know the kid down the street.
Check on the older woman next door.
Pay attention to what happens on the corner.
Support the businesses that remain.
Bring back block clubs and the expectation that neighbors actually know one another.
Vote. Follow politics. Hold elected officials accountable.
But City Hall cannot take care of your block better than the people living on it.
Chicago is thousands of blocks connected together.
When residents lose control of those blocks, everything above them becomes harder to fix.
The way I put it is less polite:
If you can’t hold your block, you can’t hold shit.
Chicago has serious problems, and documenting them every day can make the city look relentlessly violent, dysfunctional and divided.
Yet none of that changes my view of the place.
Chicago is the greatest city in the world.
Not because everything here works, but because there is nowhere else quite like it.
Different neighborhoods carry different histories, cultures and personalities while somehow remaining part of the same city.
Chicago can frustrate you, anger you and surprise you within a few blocks.
Reporting what is wrong with Chicago does not mean giving up on it.
Quite the opposite.
You document something because it matters.
And Chicago still matters.
Video Interview John Kugler Says THE PEOPLE IN POWER AREN’T WHO YOU THINK (PART 2) Sep 18, 2026 https://youtube.com/watch?v=gi0lNKlCf68…
