The last few weeks in local government
A presentations on reckless driving, an ordinance banning puppy mills, and not-quite legislation from the Equity and Inclusion Commission
The Transportation Committee
People are concerned about reckless driving. Here’s a video of some fool in Milwaukee crashing into a parked car outside a high school last month. In October, a pedestrian in Wauwatosa was killed during a street race.
The Director of Public Works, Dan Simpson, and Police Chief James MacGillis gave a presentation to the Transportation Committee on May 10th on the city’s efforts to curb reckless driving through a combination of increased law enforcement, infrastructure improvement, and information campaigns. Some of the changes include:
2-3 officers have been re-assigned to enforce reckless driving violations
The City purchased eight Radar Speed Feedback Signs using state-funded grants and placed half of them on Center Street from 124th Street to Mayfair Road during the duration of the North Avenue reconstruction project closure. They’re also looking into purchasing automated license plate reading (ALPRs) cameras
The City is currently trying to hire a traffic engineer to look at infrastructure improvements that might reduce instances of reckless driving.
But is reckless driving actually increasing? During the presentation, they had a few slides like this one:
But this covers a single 5-year (4-year?) period, and they don’t compare it to other periods, so it’s difficult to say whether this is an usually high number of car crashes. And 5 years (4 years?) is a long time. I haven’t been paying close attention, but it seems like the increased concern and news coverage about reckless driving (and car thefts) has only occurred within the past year or so. And nationwide statistics bear this out: vehicle fatalities were pretty low at 36,300 in 2019 and then increased to 38,800 in 2020 and to 42,900 in 2021.
But if I look at the Crime Mapping dashboard that Wauwatosa helpfully provides and just have it graph the combined rates of vehicle thefts, vehicle-caused property damage, and vehicle-caused personal injury (there’s no reckless driving category to choose from but these categories seemed closest), it looks there was an increase in the second-half of 2021 but then a decrease back to the levels seen in the first-half of 2021. So, is the problem already solved?
Maybe it was even lower before the pandemic, but I can’t get the graph to go back that far. And maybe the decrease is because of the actions they’ve been taking, but they don’t really say this in their presentation (and there was no video of the meeting itself). And there are still a number of actions they’re planning to take but haven’t yet, like hiring a traffic engineer and buying license plate cameras. And if reckless driving has already decreased back to baseline, is it still necessary to do those things? The Wauwatosa Crime Map doesn’t seem quite up to the task of answering these questions, so I’m not sure. But it does appear these types of problems have declined and that seems like a good thing.
The Community Affairs Committee
The Community Affairs committee unanimously recommended to approve an ordinance banning the commercial sale of cats and dogs in Wauwatosa. It was passed 14-2 by the Common Council on May 17. While regulations already prohibit puppy mills, (I’m not sure what the exact definition of puppy mill is, but Nancy Welch, the alder that introduced the ordinance, mentioned this story) this would prevent retail stores from selling cats and dogs as well. ‘No’ votes on the ordinance came from Ald. Amanda Feurst and Ald. Mike Morgan who worried about unintentionally creating a black market if people were unable to get them from pet stores.
But what was interesting to me was that during the Community Affairs meeting on April 26th when the ordinance was discussed, the accompanying memo noted that “No local retail stores will be negatively impacted by this ordinance based on current practice,” because none of the pet stores in Wauwatosa actually sell puppies or cats anyway. So, it doesn’t seem like this ordinance will have much effect other than to restrict a hypothetical future supply of cats and dogs. Ald. Wilke noted as much during the Common Council vote on May 17th but concluded: “I guess the only reason I was really going to support this was […] that it could bring awareness at the state level so they take more action.”
The Equity and Inclusion Commission:
Alder Sean Lowe in his farewell meeting as the President of the Equity and Inclusion Commission on May 5th realized law-making is more involved than “wav[ing] a magic wand.”
At issue was his proposal for a CROWN-Act-style ordinance for Wauwatosa. The CROWN Act is, from what I can tell, a piece of model legislation created by Dove (the soap people) “to ensure protection against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles by extending statutory protection to hair texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in the workplace and public schools.” I think the underlying motivation is that standards of professionalism in the workplace and in schools, especially on allowable hairstyles, more often affect African-Americans because they are more likely to have prohibited hairstyles.
However, the city’s attorney asked how we would enforce such an ordinance since “there’s not a lot of utility to ordinances we can’t enforce.”
At issue is the fact that similar legislation is generally enacted at the state-level where something like a Fair Employment or Civil Rights Enforcement Office exists, or in cities as an amendment to already existing law that lays out a process to file and enforce discrimination complaints. Wauwatosa doesn’t have anything like this. As the City’s attorney explains:
If Wauwatosa alone says that [discrimination] based on the ethnic hairstyle is a violation of a Wauwatosa ordinance, what mechanism do we have to enforce that? If I felt I was being discriminated [against] as a protected person in school, I’d have a federal or a state complaint in court, right? But if I’m violating a Wauwatosa ordinance, there’s no mechanism, there’s no state law or federal law that allows me access to the court system for that.
Everyone eventually agreed that this would be a much more involved process than an isolated ordinance on hair styles and that maybe they need to start with some sort of broader anti-discrimination law first. As Ald. Arney stated:
I would rather have the longer process, that we set up the architecture that’s needed so that it’s not just what they call performative. […] I would much rather do something meaningful that takes more time than to do something that seems like something is happening when it’s really not.
Ald. Lowe ultimately agreed but added regretfully, “That wasn’t the direction—I wish it was a lot easier. I want to wave a magic wand…”
Very informative. I appreciate your efforts and analyses.
In regards to the higher frequency of reckless driving/speeding crashes. Usually when looking at crashes 5 years of data is used because the individual variability in one year of data is so much that it’s hard to notice anything. Anecdotally it seems there is an increase but I think much of what happens doesn’t get captured in police reports and therefore crime maps. There are some companies who aggregate data from cell phones and Bluetooth tracking data. I wonder if that would be a better way to see if speeds overall or at least top speeds have increased and would be a sign of an increase of reckless driving.