Chicago Homicides Fall by 34 Percent So Far This Year High school students before their prom in Englewood, a poor neighborhood of Chicago where crime has declined this year. CHICAGO - A year after this city drew new attention for soaring gun violence and gang bloodshed, creating a political test for Mayor Rahm Emanuel in President Obama's hometown, Chicago has witnessed a drop in shootings and crime. Killings this year have dipped to a level not seen since the early 1960s. So far in 2013, Chicago homicides, which outnumbered slayings in the larger cities of New York and Los Angeles last year, are down 34 percent from the same period in 2012. As of Sunday night, 146 people had been killed in Chicago, the nation's third-largest city - 76 fewer than in the same stretch in 2012 and 16 fewer than in 2011, a year that was among the lowest for homicides during the same period in 50 years. In recent months, as many as 400 officers a day, working overtime, have been dispatched to just 20 small zones deemed the city's most dangerous. The police say they are tamping down retaliatory shootings between gang factions by using a comprehensive analysis of the city's tens of thousands of suspected gang members, the turf they claim and their rivalries. The police also are focusing on more than 400 people they have identified as having associations that make them the most likely to be involved in a murder, as a victim or an offender. As Mr. Emanuel, who has said he intends to run for re-election, begins the second half of his first term, it is unclear whether the months of lessened violence will generate a lasting trend, particularly given a spring of rainy, chilly weather here that some experts say may have kept people off the streets and contributed to the relative calm. Homicides have also decreased in New York, by more than 22 percent as of early this month, and in Los Angeles, by more than 17 percent. "It's good, but not good enough," Mr. Emanuel said in an interview of the city's improving homicide statistics. He added that a parent had approached him in one of the neighborhoods now saturated with police officers, saying she had started to feel comfortable allowing her child to walk to school. That to me is the biggest, most important, most significant measure - that a mother feels comfortable and confident enough where she didn't in past years to have her child walk to school. Critics question whether the city can continue to pay for the added police presence. By the end of April, $31.9 million of the $38 million set aside in the city budget for police overtime for the year had been spent, city records show. Leaders of the police union, who describe some of the current efforts as "smoke and mirrors," caution that the dismal statistics of 2012 are being used to paint a falsely upbeat picture of 2013, and say they doubt such intense policing efforts are financially sustainable in any major city without expanding the force. "It seems a little soon to know whether this is a long-term trend," said Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. I think everyone in Chicago hopes it is very much a trend. I wouldn't pop the Champagne yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. In some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods - even those where statistics suggest clear improvement - some residents say they feel as unsafe as ever, and worry that the closing this fall of the largest number of elementary schools in recent memory may force schoolchildren to venture down blocks controlled by gangs to get to new schools. Shootings of children 16 and younger have dropped by 46 percent compared with last year, but the details of some - a 9-year-old shot on Wednesday as he rode in his mother's car; a 15-year-old who the police say had gang ties killed about four blocks from Mr. Obama's Chicago home in April; a 6-month-old, Jonylah Watkins, fatally shot in her father's arms in March - remain jarring. "If you ask me, nothing has changed," said Magnolia Howard, who lives not far from a police station in Englewood, an impoverished neighborhood where, the authorities say, overall crime has dropped 19 percent this year. I'm still scared to let the kids play in front of the house. More than 500 people were killed in Chicago last year, many of them young men shot to death amid the hundreds of gangs that flourish in the neighborhoods mainly south and west of downtown. As in many of the nation's biggest cities, killings in Chicago have decreased significantly since the 1990s, when the annual death toll sometimes exceeded 900. But the violence of 2012 - a 16 percent increase in killings over the year before, even as overall crime in the city decreased - drew national attention to Chicago.