Video shows attempted smash-and-grab at Chicago business; 1 of at least 13 hit overnight

Let's bring you back home and over to Lincoln Park. That's where about two dozen businesses have reported break-ins this morning. Let's get over to Say. Say's out there live. Say, what have you learned out there? Well, we can tell you we counted on the ground here at least 13 businesses on the same street here on North Clark in Lincoln Park. For some context, by the way, this is just about a block east or west, excuse me, of North Pond. And I'll step aside and you can see, I mean, this is what we're seeing. I mean, this isn't even bad compared to what we saw when we first got here today. I don't even know if the cameras are picking it up and doing it justice, but you can't see any sort of glass here. So all of the glass that was here on the front door is smashed out at this point. And some businesses right now are still picking up the pieces using everything they can like mops and brooms to make sure every little piece of that glass is picked up here. I want you to check out some video that we just got from the owners over at Kala Modern Greek. It's on the same block here. You can see this guy in a dark hoodie using some sort of object to smash the front door. The owners tell me that their doors are actually made of laminated glass, which is a lot harder to break. Now, you can actually see in this video, too, that the person did not get inside and nothing was taken. But that clearly is not the case for other businesses that were hit. We have some video from the Citizen app as well that shows the damage done at Molly's Cupcakes, also on this same block. Now, it's unclear if they took anything here, but we do know Great Clips did have its cash register stolen. In fact, when clients were coming in for appointments earlier. We overheard its workers saying they're only taking payments by card today because they don't have a cash register. So here's a list of the businesses hit so far that we counted again on the ground. We haven't had much luck finding any business owners who want to speak on camera, probably because they're very busy cleaning up this mess that they didn't ask for. But several business owners tell me they planned ahead by installing laminated glass and security cameras due to the growing trend of break-ins reported across the city. And, you know, for some of the owners, especially of smaller shops, they say they've installed fake security cameras, hoping to deter people from damaging their business. But they're feeling frustrated that even that did not work. And they're now calling on the aldermen to do something about it. Guys, in the last 30 minutes, we heard from 43rd Ward Alderman Tommy Knudson. He says CPD actually placed this corridor under special attention and is running active burglary missions with dedicated officers monitoring the area. Back out here live, we are here on the ground again in Lincoln Park. In fact, in just the last 10 minutes or so, we saw a few Chicago police officers walking around here. This area, by the way, we see typically some squad cars rolling around here. That's very common in this neighborhood. But to see these officers actually going door to door to these businesses is something new and we haven't seen this morning. So with that being said, we know area three detectives are investigating this and they do urge anyone with any sort of information or perhaps some surveillance footage to reach out to police so that they can get this on their record and try to find exactly who was responsible for all this damage, guys. This seems like a story that we do over and over and over and it really doesn't matter. The place in Chicago, it's everywhere say, I mean, think about how many times that you've covered this story even just the last month. Yeah, Lauren, I think you bring up a really good point and honestly, one of the first conversations I had today with a business owner was them saying something that I think a lot of business owners can relate to. It's you don't want our prices to go up, please stop hurting our business. We're small owners just trying to make it just like everybody else in this world in the year of 2026. And so they're feeling the strain, they're feeling the financial pressure as well. And really they just want to put an end to all of this because a lot of these owners have worked really hard to get to this point. Yeah, absolutely, say thank you.