Someone was shot near my apartment in Chicago recently. Then someone else was shot a few blocks away, near the movie theater where I saw Nebraska. You might not think that's news: Lots of people are shot in Chicago. But not in Logan Square, the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where I live, and so the shootings were the subject of anxious chatter for a while.

Despite living in a city where homicides are so common that they've attracted international media attention, my neighbors and I expect them to intrude on our sense of personal safety about as much as if we lived in, say, Seattle. Coverage of Chicago's lethal crime tends to downplay, or leave out entirely, the fact that the number of homicides here has plummeted since the early 1990s, from a rate of over 30 per 100,000 residents to about 15.

But Chicago's crime was never distributed evenly across the city, and the decline hasn't been, either. In and around downtown, and on the North Side, neighborhoods with moderate numbers of homicides became some of the safest urban areas in the country. A million people in Chicago, the global poster child for first-world urban violence, now live in neighborhoods that together have the same homicide rate as New York City, the “safest big city in America.”

Meanwhile, much of the rest of Chicago has seen much more modest declines, or stagnation. In the case of two police districts on the South Side, the homicide problem has actually gotten worse. In the early 1990s, the most dangerous third of the city saw about six times more murders than the safest third. Over the last several years, the most dangerous third has seen between twelve and 16 times more homicides.

Given the increase in economic inequality over the last two decades—and the relationship between a neighborhood's wealth and its crime rate—maybe it’s not surprising that the inequality of crime has been growing as well. But New York and Los Angeles, which along with Chicago are among the ten most unequal cities in the country, haven't seen anything like that kind of change.