(Matthew Doarnberger, Headline USA) Residents of Boston’s high-crime Roxbury neighborhood are protesting the closure of a local Walgreens drug store, citing the adverse impacts to minorities already suffering disproportionately from serious medical ailments.
“The communities where they’re closing these pharmacies are communities where people are disparately impacted by disease two or three times higher rates in cancer, diabetes, heart disease,” said former Boston NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] president Michael Curry, according to CBS News. “… Life expectancy can be 15, 20 years less.”
The closure, the company’s fourth in the Boston area, comes as shoplifting in the city has increased a reported 38% since 2019, and Roxbury itself received a failing grade from Crimegrade.org.
Despite these difficulties, residents and activist groups insisted that it was the private company’s moral duty to prop up the community, even at a loss to its profit margins.
“What is your obligation?” Curry asked. “What is your expectation as a corporate citizen to do what’s right for those communities beyond what’s right just for your bottom line?”
Walgreens told Boston’s NBC10 in a statement that it considered many different factors in making the decision to close one of their stores.
“When faced with the difficult decision to close a location, several factors are taken into account, including our existing footprint of stores, dynamics of the local market, and changes in the buying habits of our patients and customers, among other reasons.”
The company issued an identically worded statement to Milwaukee news outlets over its decision last month to close a store on the city’s north side.
Not surprisingly, the surge is linked to a woke prosecutor with a cloud of ethical scandals surrounding her.
When former Suffolk County (which includes Roxbury) district attorney Rachel Rollins took office in 2019, she spearheaded a plan to decline prosecution for 15 different criminal offenses. Theft due to shoplifting was one of those infractions.
Rollins was later appointed to be a U.S. Attorney by President Joe Biden, but was forced to resign after an inspector general’s report exposed her “egregious transgressions.” That included violating the Hatch Act for appearing at a partisan fundraiser to raise money for her successor in the DA’s office.
