Defund the police push, liberal policies driving Chicago business exodus, hurting poor the most: experts

Several experts reacted to the CEO of McDonald’s suggesting his company could be the next to flee Chicago’s crime wave by telling Fox News Digital that progressive policies and defund the police rhetoric have created a dangerous situation that will cause even more businesses to flee and most negatively impact the most vulnerable communities in the city.

In a mid-September speech, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said Chicago is a “city in crisis” and that rising crime has made it more difficult to recruit employees to the company’s downtown West Loop headquarters with many scared to return to in-person work after the pandemic due to safety concerns. 

“It has become increasingly difficult to operate a global business out of the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois,” Kempczinski said.

Crime in Chicago, which has skyrocketed since the Black Lives Matter riots and defund the police rhetoric that evolved from the death of George Floyd in 2020, has been cited by other businesses as the reason to pack up and leave. Heritage Foundation senior research fellow in the Center for Health and Welfare Policy Robert Moffit told Fox News Digital that the exodus leaves lower income workers to fend for themselves in a city where police morale and staffing has plummeted due in part to defund the police rhetoric.

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“You’re talking about a situation where you have a hollowed out economy, where you have businesses leaving, there are no jobs,” Moffit said. “And the people who are desperately hurt by this are mostly low income and black and minority residents who suffer the most from this high crime.”

Last year was the deadliest year in Chicago in a quarter-century with 797 homicides, the most since 1996 and 25 more than were recorded in 2020. Crime experts told Fox News Digital in April that the massive increase in Black Americans being murdered across the country since 2020 was a result of the defund the police movement. 

Moffit pointed to a Gallup survey taken during the summer of 2020 showing that the vast majority of Black Americans want to keep police in their neighborhoods. 

“Eighty percent of Black Americans who were respondents to this poll wanted more police and wanted more police funding because when the police leave they are victimized,” Moffit said.

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While Chicago did not openly defund the police as much as cities such as Los Angeles, Austin, and Minneapolis during the aftermath of Floyd’s death, retired Chicago Police Department Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy told Fox News Digital this summer that the city engaged in a “stealth defunding” by not adequately staffing the department and replacing retiring officers.

The climate created by vilifying police, encouraging Black Lives Matter riots, cutting resources, increasing workload, and releasing criminals back onto the streets goes “hand in hand” with plummeting police morale that has contributed to an alarming number of police suicides in the city, Roy said.

The combination of rising crime, plummeting police morale, and police staffing issues have created a perfect storm that have made it increasingly difficult for both employers and employees to stay afloat in Chicago.

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“Businesses and people can not function in an environment where you are not safe,” Moffit said.

“The sad thing about the defund the police movement is it wasn’t a residential or an organizational movement,” Alderman Anthony Napolitano, who represents Chicago’s 41st Ward, told Fox News Digital. “This was a political movement. This was politicians behind this defund the police movement in Chicago, we had these paid protests where people would come into Chicago and destroy businesses with looting and that was all political. It was done on purpose and a lot of people have caught wind of that.”

Napolitano said he understands why companies like Citadel Securities, Boeing, Caterpillar, and possibly McDonald’s are dissatisfied with the city to the point of leaving because they’ve dealt with the red tape and logistical issues that come with establishing footholds in Chicago only to be faced with an unsafe environment in return from city leaders.

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“I think the biggest problem now you’re seeing from big companies like McDonald’s is they’re saying okay, we’ve done all that, can you hold up your end of the bargain?” Napolitano said. “You’re not protecting us. Crime is out of control. You know, that changes the equation completely.”

“Make no mistake, though, McDonald’s commitment to the city of Chicago isn’t corporate altruism,” Kempczinski said in his speech suggesting that McDonald’s won’t stick around if things don’t improve. “It’s not open-ended. It’s not unconditional. As a publicly traded company. Our shareholders wouldn’t tolerate that. They wouldn’t support that.”

Gary Rabine, founder of the Chicago-based Rabine Group and owner of 13 businesses, told Fox News Digital that his working class employees across the city have been robbed at gunpoint in recent years, causing him to hire security patrols and believes companies will continue to flee the Windy City.

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“I’m telling you, the majority of CEOs in Illinois who are running small, mid-sized businesses that can move will move if Gov. Pritzker wins again, that’s a huge amount of CEOs of small business and mid-sized businesses that nobody will hear about.”

Rabine, who ran as a Republican to unseat Pritzker in the Illinois gubernatorial primary earlier this year, said Kempczinski cannot fully elaborate on rising crime because it will “hurt his stock” but said “he’ll up and leave with short notice if he does.”

“People will throw their arms up in the air, but he should leave, unfortunately, if things don’t change,” Rabine said.

Kempczinski explained in his speech that McDonald’s brings $2 billion into the Chicago and suggested that his company leaving would take a toll on the local economy.

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“Can you imagine Chicago without McDonald’s?” Kempczinski said during his speech after explaining that the tax base in the city would erode and programs and institutions would suffer if the company were to leave. “I cannot.”

The experts who spoke with Fox News Digital said that the companies who have left Chicago the last few years have also taken tax revenue with them that the city now cannot spend on essential programs that low-income, minority, and middle class demographics depend on.

“Without a doubt it’s going to have an absolute ripple effect,” Napolitano said. “You’re going to have a hole it’s going to be like a cosmic hole in the city of Chicago of funds leaving here.”

Rabine told Fox News Digital that the state lost $1 billion in tax revenue when 120,000 people fled last year.

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“We lose $1,000,000,000 a year in tax revenues from chasing people out and then what happens is you’ve got to crank up the taxes on the people staying to keep up, but that doesn’t last very long,” Rabine said.

Moffit said raising taxes to replaces the revenue lost by fleeing business will continue to push out middle class Chicagoans, which will in turn end up further crushing lower income residents.

“And then you get a middle class flight and who suffers the most when you have middle class flight?” Moffit asked. “It is lower income Americans, in particular, Black and minority communities. They are the ones who ultimately are damaged by all of this. At the end of the day, they’re the ones who are damaged the most.”

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Napolitano and Rabine told Fox News Digital that the SAFE-T Act, a controversial piece of legislation set to take effect in January 2023 that will end cash bail and implement “progressive” reforms, will make life even harder for businesses as well as vulnerable residents of Chicago.

“When this safety bill goes in full force January 1st our state will look like Detroit within a few years,” Rabine said. “The state, not just the city of Chicago. The state is going to look like just a shadow of what it once was.”

Napolitano told Fox News Digital the SAFE-T Act will “open the criminal locks to flood our city with crime” and continue a trend of “protecting criminals” instead of “protecting our businesses and residents.”

“It all trickles down to the working class who get hammered the most,” Rabine said. “The honest working class get hurt the most by this.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital, but Lightfoot suggested to a reporter recently that Kempczinski’s assessment of crime in the city is coming from an uneducated position.

“I think what would have been helpful is for the McDonald’s CEO to educate himself before he spoke,” the Chicago Democrat said.

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Moffit told Fox News Digital that it is “going to take years” to rebuild the morale and staffing issues that have spread from the defund the police movement, and that it is important to immediately begin increasing foot patrols in high crime areas and create a situation where recruits want to join the police department.

While Moffit acknowledged there are many social issues that are root causes of crime and disenfranchisement in minority communities, “stopping the bleeding” by reengaging the community with law enforcement can be addressed first.

“The immediate thing is to stop the bleeding and when somebody comes in with a heart attack, you can talk about, well, you know, you really should have done more dieting and exercise,” Moffit said. “That’s the root cause of your problem. But when they’re on the gurney, your job is to make sure their heart continues to beat.”