Sunday evening in Waukesha, Wisconsin wasn’t supposed to end like this. The city’s Christmas parade was to proceed through Main Street as scheduled, with families lined up in chairs and blankets and warm drinks observing an annual ritual pass by. They watched as the youth dance team and the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies waved to the crowd. And then they saw the horror of an SUV mowing the procession down, killing five and injuring nearly 50. One witness described holding a little girl’s head in his hand as she was seizing and “bleeding out of her ears.”
Once the suspect, Darrell Brooks, Jr. was identified, the story became clear. Brooks was a career criminal (or a repeat offender, however you’d like to classify him), most recently accused of “running over the mother of his child with a vehicle in a gas station parking lot” on November 2. On November 5, he was charged with “second-degree recklessly endangering safety with domestic abuse assessments, disorderly conduct with domestic abuse assessments and felony bail jumping.” At the time of these offenses, he was already “on bail after being accused of shooting at his nephew in July 2020.”
In other words, Brooks had already attempted to kill his nephew and his baby’s mother. He was a flight risk and a danger to the community. On November 19, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office let him go on $1,000 bail.
Days later the firefighters were hosing down the blood off the streets.
The release of a violent felon on $1,000 bail was the culmination of years of “reform” by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, who was touted in 2015 as a “national leader in law enforcement” – at least according to progressive values. As promoted by the liberal Vera Institute:
“Prosecutors have to redefine their proper role in a new era. Chisholm stuck his neck out there and started saying that prosecutors should also be judged by their success in reducing mass incarceration and achieving racial equality.”
The wholly preventable murderous rampage in Waukesha wasn’t the first time Chisholm’s policies caused lives to end. And Chisholm predicted this back in 2007, where he stated:
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who's going to go out and kill somebody?” Chisholm said in a 2007 interview with the Journal Sentinel. “You bet. Guaranteed. It's guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
That “guarantee” might have first come true back in 2013, where a felon was charged with reckless homicide after being “out of custody under a deferred prosecution agreement with Chisholm's office.” (Say what you want about Chisholm, but he keeps his promises.) Chisholm’s catch and release policies have long been a danger to the public – with repeat offenders, including those charged with felony sexual assault, high-volume cocaine and marijuana trafficking, armed robbery – being released back to the public under deferred prosecution agreements.
The people of Waukesha County didn’t sign up for this – they have their own district attorney. But their interests didn’t matter to Milwaukee County DA Chisholm. Waukesha County, just like the rest of Wisconsin, would be subjected to Chisholm’s preferred policies anyways. To Chisholm, it was the people that needed to conform to the risks and failures that would surely arise from his criminal justice revolution. Back in 2019 he wrote:
“There has to be a tolerance for risk and the inevitable failures associated with change.”
The harsh reality of these policies - the release of the dangerous, the deaths of innocents - is why they are camouflaged in euphemism. “Criminal justice reform” might sound good until you realize there’s a $1,000 cash bail for attempted murder. “Bail reform” might sound reasonable until you see the deceased on Main Street. While Milwaukee voters might have asked for this, the people of Waukesha did not. (On the issue of voters getting what they voted for – but that doesn’t mean they were always told what they would get. We should also be aware that God’s judgment can be delivered by giving the public what they want.)
The inherent weakness of the progressive criminal justice policies, making them unable to stand on their own merits, is also why we see the corporate media running false information on the Waukesha killings before the bodies were cold.
Gabe Hoffman @GabeHoff
The police chief confirmed otherwise. Will you delete this misinformation? https://t.co/MZ5OLBh2sq https://t.co/UskC3SxBvBBack to being subjected to Chisholm’s policies for a moment. The policies are just a small slice of the broader top-town revolution we see taking place in New York and San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (with D.C. setting national policy).
Long ago, the progressives understood that the socialist revolution would never be achieved from a movement led by the lower-classes. They recognized that real revolution would need to start at the top of American institutions and be thrust upon the rest of us. Thus the imposition of equity, critical race theory, etc. by the institutions Americans once revered: schools and the courts. Those institutions they feel they must destroy or transform for man’s emancipation here on earth: the justice system, family, religion, conservatism, the tradition of liberty, the “shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.”
Excellent piece. Thank you for writing this.
Thanks for isolating the senior datum here which is the use of our justice and education systems to enslave society under the pretense of doing what is right. Well said, as always.