Chicago saw their bloodiest month a year ago in January which the city hadn't experience in over a decade, but crime rates and gang-related violence has gone down substantially since then, the Associated Press reported.

First Lady Michelle Obama recently visited Chicago to attend a funeral for a 15-year-old honor student who was shot and killed because of gang-violence unrelated to her only a mile from the Obama's Chicago dwelling, according to the AP.

In 2012, the city led the nation in homicides with more than 500, the AP reported. It ended 2013 with 415 homicides, the lowest for the city in half a century.

Even with their lowest number of homicides, it still beats bigger cities like Los Angeles and New York, according to the AP.

The crime rate fell last year to a level not seen since 1972, and the number of shooting incidents involving victims 16 and younger dropped 40 percent in 12 months, city officials say, according to the AP.

The city has spent $100 million on police overtime, but city officials have evidence that changing police tactics and creating and expanding after-school jobs and mentoring programs for young people are paying off, the AP reported.

"We identified gang turfs, membership, who's in conflict with who, put it into a database and put that into the hands of beat officers," Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said in an interview with The Associated Press.

McCarthy is a former police chief from Newark and said Chicago officers have warned gangs that if one of their members kills somebody, police will go after everyone in the gang for any issue, from "welfare fraud to failure to pay taxes," the AP reported.

The move against gangs is an expanding of the system his predecessor Jody Weis implemented, McCarthy says, according to the AP. Critics have called the move "coddling criminals."

The department is also providing gang members with information about social services and even sets up meetings between them and the parents of murder victims "to give them a sense of what they are doing to the community," the AP reported.