‘Sitting Ducks’: Crime Forcing Chicago Women Business Owners to Leave Town

‘Sitting Ducks’: Crime Forcing Chicago Women Business Owners to Leave Town

CBS Chicago discovered the increase in crime has caused quite a few women business owners to flee to the suburbs:

As CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov reported, one of those owners has a long history downtown. She owns Sugar Bliss, at 122 S. Wabash Ave. in the Palmer House Hilton building, which has been in business for more than a decade.

But after someone vandalized her store and tried to steal a purse while she was in the shop, last week, she is rethinking her future in Chicago – and she is not alone.

“We’re basically sitting ducks,” said Sugar Bliss owner Teresa Ging.

Ging said stress has replaced the joy of working in her cupcake and cookie storefront. Incidents like the one that happened this past Friday are the reason.

“He came in the front door of our store, then came around to the cash register,” Ging said.

Ging said the attack “happened in broad daylight.” The security camera caught the man trashing the store.

It took place as Ging had a Women in Business Networking meeting. She claimed this type of crime “happens once a month, at least.” She sent letters to Mayor Lori Lightfoot and other officials.

Uzma Sharif, the owner of Chocolat Uzma, is headed to the suburbs:

“We can’t live like this. The city has become – I won’t even say, Gotham City is a little bit better, because you have Batman,” Sharif said. “Here, you don’t have Batman – you know what I mean?”

After nine years in Pilsen, a 2021 burglary, and a friend’s carjacking just blocks away, Sharif is closing her retail shop at the end of September and moving it to the suburbs.

The suburbs, she said, are “where they have the well-funded police departments and where they want our business. It’s going to be DuPage or Will County.”

Sharif told CBS Chicago hiring a 24/7 security guard is the only way to keep her in the city.

Ging has to stay in the Loop due to her lease. But she decided to choose “a new manufacturer for her prepackaged cookies.”

Robbery, burglary, thefts, and carjacking continue to rise in Chicago.

Arrests and reporting of crimes have gone down:

The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.

The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.

The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops — in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.

And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.

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