After a visit to the city on Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that over 110,000 gang members are currently roaming the streets of Chicago, a city long plagued by corruption, lawlessness, and political cowardice.
That means roughly 4% of Chicago’s 2.7 million residents are active gang members, about one gang member for every 24 people living in the city.
“We learned that the Chicago city streets have 110,000 gang members. That’s right. You heard me right. They had 1,200 shootings this year alone, 360 homicides,” Patel said during an interview with Hannity.
Patel’s statement paints a chilling picture of a city spiraling out of control under liberal policies that prioritize optics over safety. Despite decades of Democrat rule, Chicago continues to be one of the most dangerous cities in America.
In his remarks, Patel credited President Donald Trump for empowering federal law enforcement to act decisively where local leaders have failed:
“When politicians choose to side with those metrics and not their citizenry, thank God we have President Trump and this Department of Justice and this FBI going in there and crushing violent crime.”
Under Trump’s leadership, Patel said, the FBI and DOJ quietly began sending agents into cities like Chicago and Memphis to coordinate with National Guard units, setting the stage for major federal crackdowns on violent offenders.
“President Trump sent us into these cities quietly to set the stage, to set up for the National Guard, to see the success that we saw in Washington, D.C., in Memphis,” Patel explained.
WATCH:
JUST IN: FBI Director Kash Patel says there are 110 THOUSAND GANG MEMBERS on the streets of Chicago
“We learned that the Chicago city streets have 110,000 gang members. That’s right. You heard me right. They had 1,200 shootings this year alone, 360 homicides.”
“When… pic.twitter.com/Q5woPY1g5l
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 8, 2025
It can be recalled that in 2020, Chicago’s top police superintendent, David Brown, stated there were about 117,000 gang members in the city, belonging to 55 known gangs, which in turn had about 747 factions and 2,500 subsets, according to NBC News.
The Chicago Police Department had maintained a gang database that at one point included over 134,000 people, though that database has since been dismantled (in 2023) because of concerns about ‘accuracy, racial profiling, and outdated or ambiguous designations’, according to WTTW.
According to the news outlet:
Nearly four and a half years after the city’s watchdog warned the police department’s gang databases were riddled with errors, ripe for abuse and disproportionately targeted Black and Latino Chicagoans, an interim commission overseeing the Chicago Police Department voted to scrap plans to launch a new system.
The unanimous vote by the interim Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability caps an effort that began in 2017 to stop the Chicago Police Department from using databases to track Chicagoans they believe to be in a gang. It also fulfills a campaign promise made by Mayor Brandon Johnson, who vowed to “erase the racist gang database and remove this source of racial profiling that leads to frequent, unproductive police interactions and harms residents’ ability to find housing and jobs.”
Commission President Anthony Driver said it was time to put efforts to relaunch the gang database to bed.
“It is about time we end it once and for all,” Driver told WTTW News before the vote, adding that there was no evidence the gang database ever made Chicago safer.
Driver said the “very racist and discriminatory” gang database “directly harmed people” who were denied employment and “their basic dignity.”
The audit released by former Inspector General Joseph Ferguson in April 2019 found that the Chicago Police Department listed 134,242 people as gang members. Approximately 95% of those in the databases were Black or Latino.
