Tom Wagner was working as a rideshare driver when he was shot during a Chicago carjacking in 2021.
The shooting left a jagged scar across his abdomen where bullets pierced his gallbladder, colon and liver.
After three years of calling detectives for updates — including 10 months of no response— Wagner found out last month that the police have dropped the investigation of his shooting without an arrest.
“I get that they’re understaffed,” Wagner says. “But, at the same time, where’s my justice?”
Wagner is among more than 19,000 people wounded in shootings in Chicago since 2018. The Chicago Police Department has made arrests in 1,200 of those cases.
Last year alone, there were 2,300 nonfatal shootings in Chicago. The police made arrests in just 141 of them — a “clearance” rate of about 6%, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found.
Mayor Brandon Johnson pledged during his campaign to hire 200 more detectives. The number of detectives assigned to at least one shooting actually has fallen by nearly 20%, with 40 fewer investigators in 2024 than the police department had the year before.
Experts say the chronic lack of arrests is a big part of the reason there are as many shootings as there are in many Chicago neighborhoods plagued by gunfire.
Those who did the shootings remain on the street, free to hurt more people. Seeing no arrest, victims’ friends in some cases try to take justice into their own hands and retaliate. Witnesses who already might be in fear but also don’t think arrests are likely might be less willing to cooperate with detectives — part of a widespread “no-snitch code” — making it harder to make arrests.
The police department has started a pilot program that dedicates detectives to investigating nonfatal shootings. It includes about 60 detectives across the city’s 22 police districts.
The police department assigns 8.4% of its officers to detective work. That’s well below the percentage in New York (11.4%) and Los Angeles (15.4%), though similar to Philadelphia (8.7%).
New York and Los Angeles regularly solve more than 70% of homicides. Philadelphia’s clearance rate for murders is only slightly higher than Chicago’s, which hovers around 25%.