Tyson foods latest large business to flee Chicago, what sparked the

Tyson Foods Inc. became the latest large company to announce its departure from Chicago, continuing a trend in the city that many have argued is the result of the city’s skyrocketing rates of crime and threatens to do harm to its most vulnerable populations.

“You’re talking about a situation where you have a hollowed out economy, where you have businesses leaving, there are no jobs,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow in the Center for Health and Welfare Policy Robert Moffit told Fox News Digital last month. “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.”

Moffit’s comments came after McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski took aim at Chicago in a mid-September speech, arguing that the city’s rising crime rates have made it increasingly difficult for companies to operate or find employees.

“We have violent crime that’s happening in our restaurants … we’re seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants. We’re having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants,”” Kempczinski said at the time. “So we see in our restaurants, every single day, what’s happening in society at large.”

CHICAGO FACES MORE CORPORATE DEPARTURES AS TYSON FOODS MOVES TO ARKANSAS

Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot. (REUTERS/Kamil Krzaczynski –  / Reuters)

Crime in Chicago has spiked during Black Lives Matter riots and the defund the police movement in the aftermath of the 2020 death of George Floyd, with the city recording its deadliest year in a quarter-century in 2021 with 797 homicides.

Chicago Police Department Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy told Fox News Digital over the summer that the city has engaged in a “stealth defunding” of the police department by failing to provide adequate resources and staffing to the department as officers leave or retire.

The reality has seen crime rise across nearly every category, something businesses are taking note of as they look toward the future.

Billionaire Ken Griffin announced earlier this year that he was moving his hedge-fund firm, Citadel, out of Chicago because of the rising crime, a move that was also made by mining equipment giant Caterpillar and Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company.

SKYROCKETING CHICAGO CRIME HAS SMALL BUSINESSES, CORPORATIONS PACK THEIR BAGS: ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH’

yson Foods Inc., sign at Tyson headquarters in Springdale, Ark. (AP Photo/April L. Brown, File) / AP Newsroom)

“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” Griffin told the Wall Street Journal in April. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city…