A planned Walgreens closure in Chicago’s 6th Ward is turning into a political spectacle, with Ald. William Hall calling for the company to face criminal-style punishment even as Walgreens points to theft and violent incidents as the reason the store can’t stay open.
At a Monday news conference in the Chatham neighborhood, Hall and several community members condemned Walgreens’ decision to shutter a store on S. Cottage Grove Ave., a location the company says is slated to close on June 4. Fox News Digital reported on Hall’s remarks and Walgreens’ stated rationale.
The clash matters for a simple reason: a major retailer is saying public safety and crime make the store untenable, while an elected official is trying to shift the blame onto the business, using the language of “crime” against the company itself.
Hall didn’t just argue Walgreens made a bad business call. He argued the company should be treated like a criminal defendant.
He put it this way: “Walgreens should be charged with first-degree corporate abandonment.”
Hall’s central claim is that the closure will hurt vulnerable residents, especially seniors, who depend on the store for prescriptions and other basics. He framed the company’s decision as punishment for the neighborhood.
Hall also leaned on moral condemnation, saying, “It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our elders. It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our families.”
Then he went further: “In my opinion, it should be considered a first-degree corporate crime... the number of elders who will not have access to healthcare is evil.”
That kind of rhetoric may play well at a microphone. But it also raises an obvious question: if the closure is happening because theft and violence make the store unsafe, why is the political pressure aimed at Walgreens instead of at the conditions Walgreens says it can’t operate under?
Readers who follow Chicago’s broader arguments over accountability and public safety will recognize the pattern, official outrage often rises only after a visible institution pulls out. A different kind of blame-shifting made headlines in our coverage of a local official’s comments in a separate Chicago alderwoman controversy, where the instinct was to point fingers in the wrong direction.
Walgreens, for its part, tied the closure to crime and safety. The company issued a statement cited by the Chicago Sun-Times that described how conditions on the ground overwhelmed “a range of efforts” it had already tried.
Walgreens said: “Despite a range of efforts, including previous operating adjustments, these ongoing safety challenges have made it increasingly difficult to maintain a secure environment for our team members and customers.”
And it added: “While this was not an easy decision, safety must remain our top priority.”
That is not a culture-war talking point. It’s a blunt description of what happens when a store can’t protect workers or shoppers.
Walgreens also confirmed employees at the location will be eligible to transfer to other stores, underscoring that this is a closure decision, not an abandonment of the workforce.
A second Chicago alderman, Raymond Lopez, a Democrat, said he understands the neighborhood’s anger but questioned where that energy was when criminals were hitting stores in the first place. He directly tied closures to “real-world consequences” from unchecked crime.
Lopez told Fox News Digital, “Where was that anger when the stores in our communities were under years and years of assault by criminals allowed to shoplift, vandalize, and destroy neighborhood institutions?”
He rejected the idea that store closures are just a balance-sheet issue insulated by insurance: “Many leaders say it is simply an insurance matter. They are wrong. There are real-world consequences for crime running rampant. This closure is the perfect example of that effect.”
Lopez’s point is not complicated: if civic leadership tolerates “years and years” of shoplifting and vandalism, eventually the institutions people depend on will leave.
That dynamic, leaders treating consequences as somebody else’s problem, shows up in other big policy fights, too. California’s own governance failures have drawn scrutiny in our recent coverage of Gavin Newsom’s mounting political trouble, where basic competence and accountability keep colliding with ambition and spin.
The Walgreens store is scheduled to close June 4. That leaves little time for residents to adjust, especially those Hall says rely on the location to fill prescriptions.
But even in the public argument Hall is making, key details remain unaddressed. Walgreens cited theft and violent incidents, yet the specific incidents were not spelled out in the publicly quoted statements. The store’s full address also wasn’t provided beyond S. Cottage Grove Ave.
Hall insisted, “We’re not here to beg Walgreens to stay. We are saying that their decision is the wrong decision,” even as he publicly pressed for a criminal-style response to a private company’s withdrawal.
This is where a lot of public policy talk goes off the rails: leaders demand services and storefronts remain, but they do not show a plan to make it possible for those services and storefronts to operate safely.
When Washington investigates alleged wrongdoing, the focus is supposed to be on the actors who broke the rules and the officials who enabled it. That same basic instinct, follow the conduct, not the talking points, also drives our coverage of major alleged fraud questions, like the Senate attention on alleged hospice fraud costing taxpayers billions.
Hall’s phrase, “first-degree corporate abandonment”, is not a policy. It’s a rhetorical attempt to treat a business decision as if it were a violent felony.
But Walgreens’ statement, as cited by the Chicago Sun-Times, points in the opposite direction: “ongoing safety challenges” that made it “increasingly difficult to maintain a secure environment.” If that’s true, then the primary abandonment is the failure to protect a neighborhood well enough for a pharmacy to keep its doors open.
And even if some local leaders want to wave away the criminal element as “simply an insurance matter,” Lopez rejected that framing outright. His statement amounts to a warning: when crime becomes normal, normal life gets priced out.
Big institutions face accountability when they break rules, and they should. We’ve seen it in workplace and civil-rights disputes, including a recent Illinois settlement involving Planned Parenthood and an EEOC finding. But demanding “charges” because a store won’t operate under unsafe conditions is a different kind of politics.
If Chicago’s leaders want fewer closures, they can start by taking seriously the reasons Walgreens gave: theft, violence, and safety, not by inventing new “crimes” for companies that refuse to pretend everything is fine.
When government won’t enforce order, it still finds time to punish the people who can’t function without it.