Chicago City Wire

Magnificent Mile Association president and CEO Kimberly Bares isn’t a fan of some of what she’s been forced to see in the area of late.

"We want to see the Cook County State's Attorney's Office prosecuting," Bares told ABC7 News. "Violent crime has been up and that's what has us concerned. "Carjackings, recovery of guns, some shootings -- those kinds of things."

Bares is calling on Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx to fight back by prosecuting more of those cases, along with more aggressively going after the organized retail theft rings that are terrorizing the ritzy shopping district.

"We want to see the Cook County State's Attorney's Office prosecuting,” she said. “When the police have put together a solid case, we want to see that prosecuted. And we want to see the judiciary sentence appropriately."

In one recent incident, thieves made off with coats from a Canada Goose Store, in another incident bandits made off with in the neighborhood of $10,000 worth of merchandise from a Burberry store, running the overall number of acts of violent crime reported to CPD in the 60611 zip code so far this year to 30, compared to 22 at the same time a year earlier.

Back in January, Burberry lost more than $100,000 in merchandise when stores were hit twice over a 72-hour period. In all, there were 313 violent crimes reported in the area in 2021, up by 33 percent from the year before.

Illinois Policy Institute President Ted Dabrowski is pointing a finger at Foxx and her office.

“When you start combining this crime issue that we're talking about and start adding that corporations are going to delay their office reopenings it starts to all add up again," he recently told Chicago’s Morning Answer of the area’s changing look. “I think it’s a real issue. I hear people say we don’t go down there anymore. People don’t walk around there anymore. They take an Uber everywhere they’re going.”

With the district still generating upwards of $2 billion annually in property taxes and accounting for 20 percent of the jobs in Chicago and two-thirds of the city’s hotel rooms, Bares said she’s as committed as she’s ever been in maintaining the area’s viability.

"When I start to put those statistics together, I think people then understand why this district is so important," she said.

With felony crime on the rise, a report by the Chicago Tribune says Foxx and her staff have dismissed upwards of 25,000 felony cases - including many involving charges of murder and other serious crimes – over her first three years in office. By comparison, Foxx, who was swept into office largely on a platform of criminal justice reform, had dropped charges against felony defendants at a clip that’s more than 10 percent greater than predecessor Anita Alvarez.

In a recent Chicago Tribune interview, Foxx defended her track record by claiming her office has made the decision to focus on violent crime.

With “smash-and-grab” robberies now on the rise and estimates pegging total retail theft losses felt by merchants last year as high as $4 billion, state Rep. Jim Durkin (R-Western Springs) has filed legislation targeting the organized theft rings behind the crime wave.

House Bill 4275 creates the crime of organized retail theft, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in jail if the value of the stolen goods is more than the state’s current felony threshold of $300. Individuals would face such charges whenever they “work with one or more people to steal merchandise with the intent of selling or returning the merchandise for profit” or “act as an agent of another individual or group of individuals to steal merchandise from one or more merchant’s premises as part of an organized plan to commit theft.”