Chicago’s Top Restaurateurs Want to Hire Security to Patrol One of the City’s Hottest Dining Scenes

Restaurateurs are focused first and foremost on their restaurants (one would hope), but some big names in that space are also turning their attention to crime.

A group that includes a handful of the most preeminent players in the culinary industry is hoping to secure funding to hire private security in Fulton Market, Chicago’s hottest dining neighborhood, Block Club Chicago reported recently. That encompasses the partners behind Boka Restaurant Group and the executive vice president and general counsel of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.

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The Fulton Market District Improvement Association was founded in November, and it held a town hall at the end of May to present its ideas. The group—which is led by Donnie Madia, the owner of One Off Hospitality (the Publican, Avec)—wants to enlist P4 Security Solutions to deter crime in the area, which it says would cost a whopping $800,000 a year. To reach that sum, the association is hoping that building and business owners will pitch in anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 in the form of sponsorships.

“What’s really important here is that we, as a community, band together and figure out what we need to do in the next few months to deploy P4,” Madia said at the town hall.

Madia added that the group had been working for more than a year on the plan, which would see three or four P4 patrol cars driving around the Fulton Market area, with 24-hour surveillance. The private security company hires off-duty and retired police officers, as well as retired members of the military. While they are armed and carry handcuffs, no P4 officer has shot a gun during a neighborhood patrol, the principal Steve Vitale said.

According to P4’s analysis, there have been 474 crime incidents in Fulton Market so far this year, up from 376 incidents by the same time last year. Both former Mayor Lori Lightfoot and residents of other Chicago neighborhoods have expressed skepticism of P4’s ability to reduce crime, but Alderman Walter Burnett Jr., who represents Fulton Market, said he supports the effort to enlist private security.

“It’s very noble of you to try to do what you’re all proposing here,” Burnett said at the town hall. “I think we do need to put more skin in the game.”

The owners of some of Chicago’s biggest restaurants would seem to agree with that.


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