THE WAUKESHA CHRISTMAS PARADE MASSACRE, EVERY JULY.

I'm going to stay away from any conversation about whether accused reckless driver Darrell Brooks was wrongly released.  There's plenty of discussion about the merits of detaining people during an ongoing plague elsewhere.  I also hesitate to weigh in on the state of mind of Mr Brooks that afternoon, or of who might have failed him, or failed to detain him or institutionalize him long ago.  There are plenty of others weighing in, or perhaps speculating.

Rather, I want to start with a detail that came out in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel review of his record.

A decade ago, during a traffic stop, a Milwaukee police officer jumped inside Brooks’ car, fearing he was about to be run over. The officer had pulled him over for not wearing a seat belt. As Brooks began to drive away while the officer was talking to him, the officer got inside the car and wrestled for control of the steering wheel.

Eventually, the officer was able to stop the car and removed the keys. Brooks ran away from the car, court records say, and he was arrested hiding in a children's playhouse in the same block. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in that case.

At the time, that story was just another story about reckless driving on Milwaukee's stroads, something that radio talkers and the like have paid a lot of attention to over the years.  (Mr Brooks's out of the car behavior is not what I'd expect of somebody acting with malice; in Waukesha he ditched his car, then claimed to be a homeless man waiting for his Uber (?!) and got a local to make him a sandwich, as well as being in a place to be arrested, again peacefully.)

The stroads, though, are one ingredient in those Chrismas-in-July massacres: "Minorities Suffer More Pedestrian Deaths."

Newly released statistics concerning pedestrian deaths in Milwaukee during 2017 show a slow but steady increase in pedestrian deaths, with a majority of them occurring in low-income communities, according to local advocacy group MilWALKee Walks. The statistics show more than half of these deaths are occuring on the north side of the city, followed by Milwaukee’s south side neighborhoods, all of which are home to mostly African-American and Latino residents.

Earlier this month, a community meeting on safer streets took place at the Sixteenth Street Health Center. Hector Alvarez Santiago, a pedestrian safety advocate from Puerto Rico was in attendance. He moved to Milwaukee’s South Side just three months ago, but he says he has already noticed where the city is failing in pedestrian safety.

“There is not many crosswalk signals, the painted lines are faded, and drivers do not respect pedestrians” said Santiago. “This isn’t just my street, it’s yours and yours and all of ours,” said Santiago, pointing to other community members in the room.

The story is from a few years ago, and reckless driving is common city-wide, with pedestrian deaths continuing to be high in 2019. "As of November of last year, there had been 44 deadly crashes and 8 of those were hit-and-run."

So the reckless driving problem we have here is a product of many actions that unfortunately had unintended consequences. Schools saving money by not offering drivers ed, contributed to unlicensed and uneducated drivers, The police back in the day adopting a no-chase policy contributed to a culture of no-accountability in the greater public.

Despite the corona shutdowns, or perhaps because there were fewer of those annoying law-abiding motorists in the way, conditions got no better in 2020

The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's Office said Wednesday that it recorded 107 motor vehicle accident deaths in 2020 — the highest recorded total ever for Milwaukee County.

That's an increase of 27 deaths from 2019 when Milwaukee County saw 80 traffic deaths.

So far in 2021, "In Milwaukee this year, 37 people have died from crashes involving reckless driving." The state department of transportation publishes its own data by county and advice on how to drive or walk.

Three stroads in particular, Capitol Drive, Hampton Avenue, and Silver Spring Road, seem to be where a lot of the reckless driving, and the emerging citizen discontent, are "[Community organizer Tracey] Dent said this is an ongoing problem across the north side."

Dent believes that cracking down on reckless drivers is the way to go. He initiated a petition drive that has received over 1,000 signatures calling on elected officials and the criminal justice system to increase the penalties for reckless driving.

"Stop being lenient on these reckless drivers, especially the youth. The youth thinks it's a joke...they get arrested and two hours later they are back on the street doing the same thing," said Dent.

The problem has shifted, in recent years, to disproportionately affect Black Wisconsinites, a February 2020 report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found.

Black Wisconsinites had been less likely to die in car crashes than whites and Hispanics until about 2013. But by 2018, about 17 of every 100,000 black Wisconsinites died in crashes, compared with 10 whites and nine Hispanics across the state, the study said.

Note, above, that quick release of bad drivers doesn't strike the locals as a blow for social justice.  Dive deeper into those statistics, dear reader, and you might find senior citizen pedestrians, or moms crossing the street with their kids on a walk light, or prime-age adults who happened to be in the wrong place when a speeding motorist disregarded the signals.  "Jessica Wineberg, who is Deputy Director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed and founder of MilWALKee Walks, says one of the biggest issues is getting drivers to yield to pedestrians. 'Often, pedestrians are hit in crosswalks following traffic lights,' said Wineberg. 'It’s very rare the pedestrian made the critical error.'" That is, there might be more at work than the wrong visual cues the stroad design gives drivers.  Although the Urban Milwaukee post makes all the proper nods to limited-access highway design in thickly settled areas, some of the crash investigations in Milwaukee suggest there are reckless drivers even where the visual cues are missing.

Jamera Doyle, 17, was a passenger in a Chevy Monte Carlo that police say was going more than 90 mph through the busy intersection of Green Bay Road and Capitol Drive on Saturday night, and died at the scene after being thrown from the car when it crashed into a bus shelter.

The driver, Kenneth D. Wright, was charged Thursday with second-degree reckless homicide and driving after revocation, resulting in death, both as a habitual offender, because of his 12 prior convictions for driving without a license in the past five years. He's also been cited for speeding four times since 2019, three times for 20 mph or more over the limit.

He was also charged with felony violation of a no contact order that prohibited him from being with Doyle, again as a habitual offender.

Note, again, that felons on the street doesn't come off as a blow for social justice.  Oh, wait, I said I was going to do infrastructure. Green Bay Road is today's version of a trail that might have been first established as a Mississippian trade route, and there's an expressway interchange and assorted other traffic-complicating features at that corner.  And yet somebody with prior convictions as a reckless driver goes into that area at high speed.

Here is the Waukesha parade route.  Note that Waukesha has the geography of a New England river town, somehow plopped into the middle of those Northwest Ordinance section road grids that are the Milwaukee stroads.  It seems like every few years the selectmen change the direction of traffic through that downtown area.  It's possible Mr Brooks, who got onto the parade route at the start line and is on tape blowing past the County Historical Society southwest of Barstow, was simply driving fast as a matter of course, and unsure about where to go from where he started on White Rock Avenue.  Only instead of there being the misfortunate pedestrian or two, or a bus shelter, in his course, there was a whole parade in front of him.  Now it's up to the trial to determine if he acted with malice.