Looking back to 1998, when Chicago recorded 704 homicides, the city was in the midst of a homicide decline from more than 900 earlier in the decade. The turn of the millennium saw a bottoming out, with homicides dropping to 453 at the end of 2004 — around the time the Police Department began relying on computerized data to know where to deploy officers where they're needed the most. The tally rose again somewhat, then went down again in 2014, when the city recorded 416 slayings.