City, county, state team up as traffic task force begins

Milwaukee police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers will descend on traffic hot spots in the city in a new effort to curb dangerous and aggressive driving.

“You will be noticing it,” Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales said Monday.

The initiative starts Tuesday and will take place in targeted areas over different periods of time throughout the summer, he said.

He declined to give more details, not wanting to tip off drivers as to where the officers will be located and when.

Morales was joined at a news conference Monday by Mayor Tom Barrett, Milwaukee County Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt and Wisconsin State Patrol Maj. Anthony Burrell.

The state patrol will provide extra coverage on state roads in Milwaukee, primarily Fond du Lac Ave. and Capitol Drive, Burrell said.

The vast majority of crashes are preventable because “they’re a direct result of drivers making bad decisions behind the wheel,” he said.

The new initiative comes after Milwaukee police and the sheriff’s office began separate traffic efforts last fall.

“In the fall of 2017, we had a fairly safe holiday season,” Morales said. “The sheriff ’s office was doing one operation, Milwaukee was doing another operation and our (suburban) partners were doing a separate initiative but it gave the appearance that we were all working together.”

“The trick is to work together,” he said.

Morales had said such an announcement was in the works on Thursday when he was called to discuss hit-andrun crashes before a Common Council committee.

The overall number of hit-and-run crashes in Milwaukee has steadily increased every year since 2013 and those crashes are accounting for a larger share of total crashes in the city.

The trend doesn’t appear isolated to Milwaukee.

A new study from the AAA Foundation for Safety found a hit-and-run crash occurs every minute on U.S. roads, resulting in 2,049 deaths in 2016 — the highest number on record and a 60% increase since 2009.

Then-Police Chief Edward Flynn, who retired in February, launched a “surge” in traffic enforcement at the end of last year after repeated calls for action from residents and the city’s Fire and Police Commission, the department’s civilian oversight board.

The surge happened about the same time Flynn, under the commission’s orders, made changes to the pursuit policy so officers could chase reckless drivers who were running red lights, speeding and driving erratically.

The result has been a jump in police chases in the city, with 369 pursuits last year, the highest since 2002 and a 21% increase from the year before. More than half of last year’s pursuits came in October, November and December — after the change to the policy.

“At the end of the day, we want those numbers to drop” because of a drop in reckless driving, Morales said on Monday.

Also last fall, Schmidt assigned deputies to random “saturation patrols” on the freeway system to address speeding and other reckless driving with help from Wisconsin state troopers.

Schmidt has emphasized safe driving since he took over as the agency’s acting boss in August and released a public service announcement in which he urges drivers to “slow down, drive sober and stay alive.”

On Monday, he pointed out the importance of all three agencies focused on the same problem.

“This is the real deal,” Schmidt said. “We’re getting along, we’re working together, we’re making a change.”

The new effort does not come with additional cost.

The agencies are using their existing budgets to fund the increased patrols, Barrett said.