Criminals no longer fear punishment in Chicago and media outlets aren't being honest about it.
The Chicago Bears may soon play in Indiana, and somehow the city’s political class still wants to talk around the obvious.
Yes, the stadium fight is about money. It is about taxes, control, ownership, infrastructure, parking, development rights, and the fact that Soldier Field is a bad modern NFL stadium. The Bears do not own it. They do not control enough of the revenue. They bought land in Arlington Heights, then watched Illinois fail to deliver the tax certainty and political competence needed to keep the deal moving.
Indiana, meanwhile, did what functioning governments do when they want something. It made a serious offer.
But the possible loss of the Bears is not only a stadium story. It is a governance story. The same city and state leadership that cannot keep an iconic franchise from flirting with Hammond also cannot keep pharmacies open, cars intact, transit safe, neighborhoods orderly, or murder cases reliably solved.
Crime is not separate from Chicago’s dysfunction. Crime is one of its most visible features.
When Chicago Bears legend Brian Urlacher recently complained that Illinois officials should have done whatever they had to do to keep the Bears in the state, he was making a priorities argument. He asked how leaders could spend billions elsewhere and still fail to preserve one of Illinois’ most beloved institutions. You do not have to agree with every word of his politics to understand the frustration. The Bears are not just another private business. They are woven into Chicago’s identity. Losing them across the state line would be a civic humiliation.
But Chicago has been absorbing humiliations for years.
Residents wake up to smashed car windows and stolen airbags. What used to be catalytic converters has now become another wave of organized theft. Thousands of airbags have reportedly been stolen or damaged in just the first months of this year, a crime that leaves victims with broken glass, repair bills, insurance headaches, and vehicles missing a life-saving safety feature.
The proposed official answer?
More recordkeeping. More rules for repair shops. Maybe drivers should use steering wheel locks and park under better lighting.
But here is a wild idea: arrest the thieves.
This is the part that Chicago’s political and media class often seems desperate to avoid saying. They will discuss “root causes,” resale markets, equity, transportation hardship, lighting, cameras, and neighborhood investment all day long. Some of those things are real. None of them replaces consequences.
The city cannot keep transferring responsibility to victims. Buy a lock. Install a camera. Avoid that train station. Don’t park there. Don’t walk there. Don’t expect the pharmacy to stay open. Don’t expect the Bears to stay. Don’t expect the police to solve the case.
At some point, residents begin to understand the message: you are on your own.
That is how underreporting begins. People stop calling police over thefts, vandalism, threats, harassment, or even assaults because they believe nothing useful will happen. They stop giving evidence because they fear the person they identify will be back in the neighborhood before the ink on the paperwork is dry.
This is not paranoia. Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot herself warned Democrats about this exact dynamic after leaving office. She said that when witnesses muster the courage to identify someone who shot up the neighborhood, only to see that person walking around again days later, the justice system is telling victims and witnesses it does not care.
That is not a conservative caricature of Chicago. That is the former Democratic mayor of Chicago describing a slow-motion civic disaster.
The murder numbers make the point even more brutally. Chicago can tout a headline clearance rate, but once so-called “exceptional clearances” are stripped away, the percentage of murders cleared by arrest is reportedly closer to 25 percent. In plain English, roughly three out of four killers may never even be arrested. Convictions, naturally, would be lower still.
What lesson does that teach criminals?
It teaches them the odds are good. It teaches them the system is overwhelmed, slow, political, and inconsistent. It teaches them that if they move fast, intimidate witnesses, exploit crowded neighborhoods, and keep cycling through the same weak justice pipeline, they may never face meaningful punishment.
The new question is not why Chicago has so many criminals. The better question is: why doesn’t it have more?
If stolen airbags can be flipped for quick cash, if shoplifters can loot businesses until stores close, if armed crews can dump stolen cash registers near the governor’s home, if murder cases often end with no arrest, what exactly is the deterrent? Civic shame? Press releases? Task forces? A new ordinance?
Chicago officials often sound angrier at companies that leave than at the conditions that made them leave. A pharmacy closes after theft and violence, and politicians denounce “corporate abandonment.” The Bears look to Indiana, and everyone pretends it is only about a stadium spreadsheet. Residents complain about crime, and they are handed selective statistics.
But people do not live inside statistics. They live on blocks. They park cars. They ride trains. They walk dogs. They open stores. They raise children. They remember where the shooting happened, where the window was smashed, where the server was attacked, where the pharmacy used to be.
A city survives when ordinary people believe the rules still work. Chicago’s problem is that too many people now believe the laws only apply to those willing to obey them.
If Chicago loses the Bears, it will not be because of one bad stadium negotiation. It will be because a great American city became too expensive, too disorderly, too politically unserious, and too hostile to normal expectations of safety and competence.
The Bears may be the symbol. Crime is the symptom. Failed governance is the disease.
And Chicago is going terminal.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)