Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation

I wonder what the accuracy of the data is like. And what do you do about damaged pipes? I read that cities lose a lot of water to leaks. Doesn’t that also mean pollutants can get in? And it won’t matter if your pipe is lead or whatever else.

An aside: lead exposure is thought to lead to increase violence. I wonder if Chicago having the most lead pipes is also a contributing cause of their (reputed) crime problem.

Crime’s down in Chicago. 2024 saw a ~6-7% drop:

https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-CPD-An...

There are pages of tables comparing 2023 and 2024 on page 108. Sadly, they don’t go back multiple years.

Page 112 says there were 9112 aggravated assaults in 2024.

Page 10 of the 2004 report says there were 18,731 that year.

I’m sure you can find someone that’s graphed the trends online. Maybe an LLM can do it. Anyway, there isn’t a violent crime crisis in Chicago.

Reports going back to the 1990’s: https://www.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/statistical-re...

Crime is down just based on the actual numbers (also anecdotally from someone who has spent the majority of their life in/around the city) and for most people the city is pretty safe right now. While there is violence this sort of pearl clutching historically hurts those exact communities you're talking about (and also is not how the people I've met from those communities described their experiences anyway).

Crime is only down because you're comparing against the pandemic highs. If you look at the long term trends, it's still up and to the right compared to 10 years ago and previous to that. The fact you are okay with this disgusting level of violence in minority communities is really something else.