“Multiple People Dead” At Waukesha Holiday Parade From Rampaging SVU
An SUV plowed through a holiday parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin leaving a trail of dead and injured in it’s wake.
There are multiple people dead after an SUV drove through the Waukesha Holiday Parade route on Sunday, Nov. 21, according to Waukesha officials. Eleven adults and 12 children were transported to area hospitals. Authorities did not indicate the exact number of deaths due to family notifications.
“We will not be releasing information on fatalities at this time as we work to inform loved ones,” the Waukesha chief of police said.
The Waukesha police chief announced that a person of interest is in custody.
As a result of the incident, the School District of Waukesha canceled classes Monday, Nov. 22, for all grades 4K-12. Counselors will be available at all buildings for students who may need support.
A shelter in place warning was issued by the Waukesha Police Department at approximately 7:05 p.m. and lasted until around 8:08 p.m.
Cellphone video captured the red SUV speeding through the crowd, hitting pedestrians and accelerating throughout the route.
Ugh. Horrible.
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I was gonna say, “Covid is driving us all crazy” but then you posted this and it isn’t necessarily a “crazy” thing at all. Just the normal kind of crazy.
And yeah. Horrible.Report
Motives certainly matter. If he was fleeing from the police, that is one sort of crime. If he drove into a crowd out of specific malice, that is a different sort.
I’ve watched a few different videos of the incident. The driver seemed to avoid people until he reached a point where he could not. At the point, he drove directly into the parade marchers. On the other hand, I heard no sirens. I saw no police cars following. It did not appear to be “hot pursuit,” although I suspect police would cut off hot pursuit when they got near the parade. At this point we can’t say anything for sure.Report
Thank you for pointing this out re the lack of pursuit. This has bothered me from the very start.
I also listened to the police scanner report and there was seemingly no traffic regarding a police chase in the vicinity. The police seemed baffled, like the guy came out of nowhere if there was a pursuit in progress, would that not have been all over the police bands?
Something about this doesn’t quite add up to me.Report
Maybe splitting hairs, but it says he was fleeing a crime scene, not necessarily being chased. Obviously need to wait on the investigation but it’s possible he was panicking to get as far as possible from something the police weren’t yet aware of.Report
I’m going to go ahead and speculate here a bit. First, he was out of bail for some kind of domestic violence thing. That’s pretty much confirmed — at least as much as something can be on Twitter. People have posted screenshots of court records. Anyway, Jaybird’s comment mentioned he was fleeing from a stabbing.
Gee, a guy just gets out from a DV rap. I wonder who he stabbed.
Thing is, Eliot Roger murdered his roommates before he went on his killing spree. So I can imagine this guy decided to murder his ex before going out in a blaze of (not) glory.
In other words, just because he stabbed someone does not imply this wasn’t an act of terror. The first does not preclude the latter.
That said, in the video he was racing through the parade and avoiding people — at least that is how it appeared to me, based on looking at all the vids I could find on Twitter. It was only when he reached a place where the marchers completely blocked his path that he began hitting people. If he intended this to be terror, I expect he would have been driving over people the whole time.Report
People keep saying he was avoiding people, but in the video I saw, once he started hitting people, he slowed way down for a moment, then sped up and veered into the crowd. It seemed quite deliberate to me.
It seems to me that there are other reasons a person may have wanted to avoid some people and hit others – maybe he didn’t want to hit kids, maybe he was looking for a higher body count/bigger crowd, maybe he was trying to hit a specific person or persons.
Considering the guy ran his domestic partner over with a car earlier this month, I personally wonder if it was the latter. This could have been a targeted domestic violence situation, going after the friends/family of his abuse victim.Report
I imagine he slowed down because he paused to make the decision. Do I do this? Do I cross this line?
Which sure, he already crossed the line with his gf, but for him that was personal. I image he felt justified in doing that.
Of course he’s not justified, in case I need to say that. I’m just imagining how he might think about it. Violent abusers often feel as if they own the people in their lives. It’s a common pattern.
A crowd of innocents is different. It was enough to make him pause.
And then he hit them anyways.Report
This seems like a perfectly reasonable response, but the thing is, I have seen about 40 tweets including some from famous people who decried the event as “the police CAUSED this with a high speed pursuit.”
I’m not speculating about the guy himself, but merely speculating about the speculation that the evil police chased him right into the parade with their irresponsible police behavior.
That doesn’t seem to have happened, at least according to the scanner recording that I heard.Report
Mercifully I am not on twitter.
I guess we will just have to see how the investigation goes.Report
As I said to Kristen, I see no reason to blame the police for this. That said, if they were at fault, on the outside chance, I doubt the “investigation” would reveal that.Report
Honestly, anyone blaming this on the police is being a complete idiot. There is no reason to think the police did anything wrong.
That might change I guess, if evidence comes out, but as of now I’m pretty sure there is precisely one person to blame for this, the man who drove the car.Report
Seems like the media are being much more scrupulous about making sure they get the facts right in this case.
I’m sure that it’s because they learned their lesson after the colossal fish-ups that characterized their coverage of the Kenosha and Covington affairs, and not because the naive (and apparently incorrect) interpretation is that they incited this.Report
The guy apparently posted bond for two felonies and three misdemeanors on the 19th.
In recent decades, there has been a movement among reformers to make sure that much more progressive prosecutors get elected and be much choosier about making sure that there is diversity, inclusion, and equity in their decisions in who to prosecute to their fullest ability (and who not to).
See, for example, San Francisco.
I could see this trend reversing in the next year or so.Report
Yes.
That is the culprit here, isn’t it?
I mean we know almost nothing about this case, but we can immediately identify reform of the carceral state as the problem, and therefore a return to more authoritarian policing as the solution.Report
I generally have both bail and prosecution in different buckets than policing.
I don’t know if others do.
The DA appears to have already admitted that the accused’s bail was set inappropriately low.
So maybe this is merely an opportunity for retraining.Report
Keep in mind that the purpose of bail is to ensure the accused appears in court.Report
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. People get incarcerated awaiting trial, and it can really mess up their lives. This is busted. If we are going to maintain “innocent until proven guilty,” then it isn’t okay to lock someone up for nine months or whatever just for being accused.
Now cash bail is another whole kettle of badgers. I’m not really sure what to think of it. Obviously there is a lot of injustice in our cash bail system. On the other hand, the alternative cannot be just to leave people to languish in jail. It’s hard.
Plus empathy plays a role here. It’s very easy to look at this case, and this scumbag, and say, “We should just lock them all up,” but not every defendant is like this guy. Moreover, our court systems are clogged with people who are minorities and entrenched in poverty. Locking all of them up won’t work. It will make things even worse. The system is busted.
I’ve noticed that people’s attitudes on this topic change when we talk about accused people more “like them.” For example, have you noticed that conservative men become very interest in due process when a man is accused of sexual harassment? They don’t show that same devotion to due process for the thousands and thousands of minority people stomped by our (not) justice system daily. In other words, it’s easy to empathize with “someone like myself” and harder to empathize with the “other.”
Anyway, I want judges and the courts to be more forgiving in general, but obviously this guy should have stayed behind bars. In retrospect, that seems obvious. However, I bet any policy we try to build out of this case will just make our society more cruel.Report
I think it’s a problem for all the reasons you state but that sadly defies simple solutions. I’m hard pressed to think of an approach that both respects innocent until proven guilty but also never has us regretting a release.Report
This is a hot topic of discussion here in Chicago, and it’s caused me to do some reflection.
Bail reform, coupled with trying to reduce incarceration, is trying to solve a decades old problem. Naturally, it’s not always going to go well, but, IMO, it’s a necessary thing. If we had a prison system geared towards rehabilitation instead of punishment, then I’d be all in favor of locking people up, but we don’t have that right now. Moreover, half or more of the powers that be are all in favor of continuing the status quo.
It’s not a problem that’s going to be solved overnight, but I think the effort is noble, right, and worth trying.Report
Bail does not exist to stop people from committing more crimes. It exists (hypothetically) to make sure they show up in court. (It exists in reality because wealthly people do not want to spent time in jail.)
However, _this_ guy shouldn’t have gotten bail at all, (or been released at all, ‘bail’ shouldn’t be required) considering one of the crimes he was charged with was apparently felony bail jumping.
It seems really absurd people can get out on bail when charged with jumping bail. While I disagree with locking people up until trial _generally_, I’m pretty sure ‘deliberately fleeing from trial’ is at least one situation where they should actually lock someone up until then.Report
He jumped bail in Nevada, evidently, in 2016. I wonder if the WI courts even knew that. Certainly they should have known, but who can guess how this got screwed up.
I expect there will be some personel changes at the district attorney’s office.Report
There’s a recent book by Steven Brust (not a Vlad book, but set in the same continuity) that’s a pastiche of The Count of Monte Cristo. The Edmond Dantes characters isn’t sent to prison, because that would give him a chance to defend himself at trial. Instead he’s send to jail awaiting a trial that never happens.Report
So the problem here is that the government needs more power to imprison those accused of crimes?Report
I think that “here” has a lot of problems and there is no single silver bullet.
But it sure as hell looks like “tough on crime” is going to come back with a vengeance.
How do you rate the store of goodwill Team Good has going?Report
What you mean is that Jaybird wants to get tough on crime by increasing the power of the government to imprison people.Report
While I appreciate you telling me what I mean, I have no problem telling you that “you’re wrong”.
You’re wrong.
Last Summer was the summer of “Defund the Police” and that was defused by stuff like “well, you don’t understand what we meant by ‘defund'” and “nobody was arguing that we should defund the police”.
In this case, we have a prosecutor who let this guy out on bail a few short days ago for, apparently attempting to run someone else over in a domestic violence situation.
Whether you think that the guy’s bail was sufficiently low isn’t as interesting to me as whether the prosecutor is saying “yeah, this guy’s bail was set waaaaay low!”
I’m guessing that the prosecutor has his (or her, I guess) finger in the air and can tell which way the wind is blowing.
The pendulum is going to swing back.
And it doesn’t matter how I feel about it.
But if you want to know how I feel about it, I can point you to an essay of Oscar’s that talks about police reform and mentions a bunch of stuff that I more or less agree with to the point where I’d call any disagreement a quibble.Report
The issue isn’t how much his bail was set for, unless it was set high enough that he couldn’t raise it. In other words, the issue is whether he should have effectively been denied bail. Give the outcome, yes, we all wish that had happened, and give what he was accused of (and we’re all assuming guilty of), perhaps it should have.
But I’d hate to see the result of this be that people accused of shoplifting and drug possession go back to falsely pleading guilty rather than rot in jail for months at a time.Report
I don’t know that “keep the pendulum from swinging back” is one of the options.
Well, it might be in San Francisco, of course.
But, I mean, in the parts of the country that are unlikely to keep a Chesa.Report
It’s hardly swung far enough to swing back.
But, sure the reaction is going to to be higher sentences, less bail, more support for preventive detention, and a quicker path to the death penalty. As always.Report
Do you think Chesa is going to get reelected?
If he runs again, are you going to vote for him?Report
No idea. I don’t live in San Francisco.Report
Ah, I see.
This isn’t Jaybird expressing his opinion of what should happen, but merely telling us what will happen.
Y’know, just an indifferent observer, without any opinion of his own.
Where this amazing predictive power comes from is unexplained, unsupported by any sort of evidence, but we are supposed to accept it.
I, by contrast, predict there will be a massive upsurge in support for police unions and a stronger QI.
This brings me no joy, you understand, and I have absolutely no opinion one way or another truly!
But the American public will rally around police unions and QI in a manner not seen since the days of yore.
And if events continue, you can expect to see a surge of support for socialism, another issue about which I am completely indifferent.Report
Where this amazing predictive power comes from is unexplained, unsupported by any sort of evidence, but we are supposed to accept it.
“What happened last time?”
That’s where my power comes from.
“What do you mean ‘last time’?”
“The last time there was a rise in ‘violent crime’. I’m thinking specifically of the 80’s to early 90’s.”
That’s where my predictive power comes from.
I, by contrast, predict there will be a massive upsurge in support for police unions and a stronger QI.
Do you think that even people who strongly supported Police Unions in 2019 and then wavered in 2020 and stopped supporting them will turn back to supporting police unions again?
I’m going to use this as an indicator of whether police reform is likely/possible (or the extent to which it is impossible, to put a finer point on it).
And if events continue, you can expect to see a surge of support for socialism, another issue about which I am completely indifferent.
I am pretty sure that this will happen as well. “We want more socialism!” (But “socialism” will be defined as “free health care” and “pay off my student loans”. It won’t be defined as stuff like “and I am willing to pay more in taxes to the point where it impacts my lifestyle”, for some reason.)Report
If your wishcasting is based on that, I would be happy to bet the farm on any other outcome.
This very thread illustrates this.
No one was talking about bail or carceral reform, except you.
No one has continued to pound that drum vociferously, except you.
Your opinions on this matter are clearly very strong, but not widely shared by the commenters here.
So why should we believe that somehow America writ large shares your conviction that this horrible tragedy means the government should have more power over accused citizens?Report
You keep saying “wishcasting” when I am pointing to stuff like the DA saying “Whoops, we screwed up bad with this one! We will be reviewing our policies and making sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
And since I’m willing to say “Crap, the DA is admitting that they effed up and are saying that they won’t do this again, they must know that they screwed up pretty bad” and then I extrapolate from there what they’re likely to do.
You’re saying that my reading this is “wishcasting” when, really, it’s just looking at what they said and agreeing that it lines up with what reality seems to be.
Your opinions on this matter are clearly very strong, but not widely shared by the commenters here.
Appeals to “well, how many people *AGREE* with you?” aren’t really that moving for me.
I tend to assume that they’re looking at different evidence. I figure that if I can get them to look at what I see, they will agree with me.
I only really have problems when people start saying stuff like “oh, I don’t have formal training in looking at evidence.”
So why should we believe that somehow America writ large shares your conviction that this horrible tragedy means the government should have more power over accused citizens?
Because, I imagine, they’d look at what the DA said about how they didn’t even follow their own guidelines and would make sure that they followed their own guidelines in the future. Because, I imagine, America writ large will respond to increasing rates in violent crime the way they did last time. Because, I imagine, the pendulum swings.
And when these things either happen (or fail to happen) I will either think “well, I saw that that happened more or less the way I thought it would” or I will think “holy crap, I got that wrong”.Report
Has it occurred to you that your viewing lens is distorted by your own preferences? Because this is the single most common error in barstool sports.
The very best predictor that someone is blind to their biases is when they vehemently deny having any opinion.Report
My viewing lens, in this particular case, is WHAT THE DA HIMSELF SAID.
Is there evidence that I ought to be looking at instead?
Please present it! I WOULD LOVE TO SEE IT!Report
What makes you think this incident won’t be entirely forgotten in a month?
Whereas the proponents of carceral reform will be getting a continuing boost from unexpected quarters, namely the Jan 6 defendants who are quite vocal about how unjust the system of bail is.Report
What makes you think this incident won’t be entirely forgotten in a month?
By whom?
I have no doubt that the MSM will treat with the exact same amount of curiosity they demonstrate toward the Las Vegas shooting.
There will be a handful of people still yelling about it but we’ll see “you’re still talking about that? He had a trial! He got convicted! He’s in prison for the rest of his life! Why are you still talking about it!” as a response to these people.
When it comes to the next prosecutor election, I don’t expect this guy to make the cut.
Whereas the proponents of carceral reform will be getting a continuing boost from unexpected quarters, namely the Jan 6 defendants who are quite vocal about how unjust the system of bail is.
I imagine that the proponents of carceral reform will do a good job of shooting themselves in the foot by saying that they agree with carceral reform in theory… but every single example of change in the system will get a “but not *THAT*.”
We should have carceral reform! But, you know, not QI. We shouldn’t touch police unions. Cops need to be able to do their jobs! Nobody was ever arguing that the police receive less money in the budget. That’s a right-wing talking point.Report
The fact that advocates of carceral reform have won elections even while not giving a rip about police unions puts a dent in the “shooting themselves in the foot” analysis.
Aside from internet commenters named Jaybird, is there any sizable group advocating for abolition of police unions?
Is there any evidence that advocating this position wins elections?
We already know that all the other components of carceral reform have popular support. But police unions just don’t seem to matter very much one way or the other.Report
Chip, my argument is that 2020 was the high-water mark for carceral reform and the pendulum is now swinging back to “tough on crime”.
Pointing out that advocates of carceral reform won when the pendulum was swinging that way is true but beside the point of the whole “the pendulum is swinging back” thing.
Aside from internet commenters named Jaybird, is there any sizable group advocating for abolition of police unions?
I was trying to do my part of changing one mind at a time. Mostly by showing people evidence that they could use to show others.
You can lead a horse to water, I guess.
We already know that all the other components of carceral reform have popular support. But police unions just don’t seem to matter very much one way or the other.
They do? I know that they *DID*… but that was then.
This is now.Report
I’m not seeing much evidence for any pendulum swinging.
Maybe its my vantage point here in California where no one has lost a race due to the issue.
Maybe its that I don’t really see the opposition party calling for anything that amounts to lip service.
Maybe its because I don’t see much opinion polling giving much support to the issue one way or the other.
Maybe you’re seeing something else?Report
I’m seeing the DA publishing an official statement that they screwed up, for one. (Scroll down a little bit, if you want to see it.)
I’m seeing the White House press secretary accusing the Republicans of being the *REAL* party that wants to defund the police.
And, of course, I’m looking at stuff like polling.
I guess I can’t ask you for links to what you aren’t seeing.Report
These are pretty wispy strands upon which to build such a sweeping claim!
I recall reading that almost every single year, respondents claimed that “crimes is worse now than last year”, even as crime rates dropped to levels not seen for 50 years.
And yet, this has not resulted in any pendulum swinging.
If you read your link, you’ll see (what we always see) is that the majority of people responded that they feel safe in their own communities, even as they imagine crime to be rising somewhere else.
On the other post, you blockquoted Freddie’s words about how the opponents of social justice/ wokism are working towards, “not liberalism, not reaction, not conservatism, not civil liberties, not plain ol’ common sense, but anarchy, resistance, revulsion towards piety…yadda yadda yadda.”
You can see, right, how this is flatly opposed to any sort of “”Law and Order” message?
I mean, given that half the Republican Party is running around chanting “Be Ungovernable” and vowing guerilla resistance to vaccine mandates, and valorizing the Jan 6 insurrectionists, why would anyone think that the message of Law and Order is going to win the day?
The Republicans are the hippies, and Biden is Reagan.Report
These are pretty wispy strands upon which to build such a sweeping claim!
Wispy they may be but strands they are.
They even exist in such form that I may point others to them and say “look for yourself”.
And yet, this has not resulted in any pendulum swinging.
I am saying that the pendulum is swinging back. You say that you don’t see it. I say that I do.
Is there a measurement whereby we can judge whether one of us was right?
You can see, right, how this is flatly opposed to any sort of “”Law and Order” message?
Compared to… what? Because if the opponents of social justice are taking it out on Chesa, I could easily see how that lines up with Law & Order.
Here’s a thread that I think you’ll find fun to dismiss entirely without even reading it. The question that I’d have is “is this woman representative of anything?” (and the follow up “if so, what?”)
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That’s chilling.
Makes me want to vote for Beto O’Rourke and start confiscating guns.Report
Better start funding the police!Report
Oh, and I wish I had seen this earlier.
Anyway, if you would like to donate to Beto O’Rourke, you can do so here. I don’t think that he’ll be able to put up a good showing without your help (or the help of other Democrats in California) and you’ll be able to tell your friends that you donated to him the next time you all share a meal at the French Laundry!Report
‘Yes, the bail bondsman should have made several times money than what they did before this guy was released on the streets. They only made a thousand dollars posting his bail, but it turns out this guy was really dangerous and they should have made three thousand dollars posting his bail! I say as if this is a statement that makes any sort of coherent sense.’ -The DA
Does anyone actually hear themselves when talking about bail? If the problem was that this guy was out, then HE SHOULD HAVE NOT GOTTEN BAIL.
We have really programmed ‘People should be able to pay to get out of jail so that how much time you spend in jail is determinate on how wealthy you are’ deep into people, don’t we?Report
If you would like to read the statement from the DA, you can do so here:
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What I’m reading here is the state is ill equipped to honor the 6th amendment right of the accused, and was thus compelled to release him instead.Report
This is quite an opportunity for a strong liberal to run on the rights of the accused following a tragic accident.Report
Either the Bill of Rights means something or it doesn’t.Report
They can put that in the ad!Report
I don’t often think comments at this site are trolling, but I do believe we’ve reached that point.Report
One thing I wondered was whether the DAs in Waukesha were elected. It looks like they are.
So the DA has a choice. Run with the whole “our principles make it so that it’s important for us to let this guy out on bail” or “we screwed up and we should have put this guy away for a good long time”.
Assuming that prison is something that we agree ought to exist for sufficiently violent criminals, we then get to discuss whether vehicular domestic violence would qualify as crossing the line.
And, from there, we can game out what’s likely to happen, at least, in the next election for DA.
For what it’s worth, when I game this out, I’m seeing the DA not getting reelected (if he doesn’t get primaried… do DAs have primaries)?
I’m looking at the national violent crime numbers and remembering the last time there was a backlash against the violent crime numbers going up.
And, cynically, I’m seeing that there is an option between “helping the pendulum swing back as far as it can” and “maybe dampening the swing back a little”.
Discussions of the rights of the driver lead quite quickly to discussions of the rights of the children and elderly who were recipients of the vehicle’s kinetic actions.
I know that, if I were writing a speech for one of the DA’s in the next election, I’d rather be tasked with writing one for the “Law and Order” candidate than the one who wants us to focus on Darrell Brooks’s right to a speedy trial. I think I’d find it easier to write without wanting to spit.Report
Of course it’s easier to write one for the law and order candidate. I for one, however, would hope that our elected officials, especially those in that office, would at least give a nod to the Constitution.Report
The problem is the game is iterated and opponents are doing two things:
1. Remembering last time
2. Smooshing multiple different opponents into an amalgam
So you get to deal with all of the people who remember “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of accountability”, “the 2nd amendment doesn’t mean *THAT*”, and “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law”.
“But that’s not fair”, I can imagine someone else saying in response to this criticism.
Yeah. I suppose it ain’t.Report
I know you’re absolutely right, and I’m thinking of the Platonic ideal of a DA who’s more interested in getting it right than in notching his belt.
I wish that wasn’t the case.Report
Have we ever even had one of those? Like anywhere?
Like, does even Chesa qualify?Report
Probably not, but, like true socialism, it’s never been tried.Report
Yeah, everyone’s skimming right over that fact.
You want to know how to keep this guy off the streets?
HOLD THE DAMN TRIAL FOR HIM.
He was originally arrested a year and a half ago! He asked for a speedy trial, it’s not _him_ delaying things.
Hell, he was held in custody for over six months before they were forced to reduce his original bail.
He was charged with two counts of a Class G felony, and one class G felony is up to ten years in prison..,and then there’s the added ‘doing it with a gun’ penalty. Like, this guy could have been put prison for twenty years, or, or probably more realistically, five-ten.
But you have to have a trial to get that result, and to do that, you have to fund the pesky parts of the justice system that _aren’t_ the flashy DA and the police department…you actually have to fund public defenders and courtrooms and judges and all sorts of things.
—
…you know, I’ve often suggested just breaking the entire justice system in half via having some wealthy person bail everyone out in one jurisdiction, and then they have no incentive to plea out. The court system would literally melt down…it can’t even handle this _one guy_ who refused to sign a plea deal.Report
Believe it or not, a few days back, I made the comment:
“…I’d be interested in hearing why tactical pleading is good, actually and jailtime based on it is good, actually.”
Anyway: Yes. We should have more jury trials. They should be quicker.
One of the theories behind why Rittenhouse was found acquitted was because the prosecutors were so used to everybody copping pleas that they had no experience actually prosecuting in a for-real trial.
This strikes me as a silly post-hoc “we woulda won if we had better players” post-game take but I do wonder whether a competent prosecutor would have gotten something on *ONE* of the charges.
I digress.
Yes. We should have more jury trials.Report
I am aware of the statement, that doesn’t make it less absurd.
Now I know the actual monetary values, so let me plug them in and translate for people who do not understand what is being said here.
The argument being made is that Brooks should have had to pay a much larger bond, let’s say $10,000, instead of his $1000 dollars.
If that had happened, you people all understand: He would have just taken his $1000, and instead of paying it directly, he would have paid a bail bondsman, who would have paid the $10,000 for him. Or even less than $1000.
And he would have been out on bail.
Everyone gets that, right? That people do not pay larger bail, bail bondsman do?
He wouldn’t have gotten the $1000 back _later_, but it seems unlikely that would have changed his plans.
Alternately, the claim is bail should have been set so high it wouldn’t be risked by a bail bondsman or he wouldn’t have had enough to cover their risk, but at _that_ point, what is being argued is that he shouldn’t have bail, and people are trying to use a loophole to avoid not setting bail.
Because not setting bail has certain specific restrictions in the law and can only exist in certain circumstances.
Circumstances I’m pretty sure that this guy met, considering he was literally charged with bail jumping, and it seem entirely likely someone can be denied bail based on that fact…but the fact that ‘bail should be higher’ is where the DA’s brain goes instead of doing things _properly_ by not allowing bail is very telling.Report
I think it’s a mixture of a handful of things.
Looking at this from the DA’s perspective:
1. We cannot reasonably argue that we did not make a mistake. Maybe if we let him off two months ago we could… and certainly not given that the specific crime was that he attempted to run over his child’s mother three days prior.
2. We cannot argue that the guy shouldn’t have gotten bail. There’s a sixth amendment! These amendments are important and we, as government officials, are obliged to follow them to the letter! We took an oath!
3. Okay. The bail was lower than even we would have recommended if we were following our own recommendations which, you know, we don’t because doing so would not be in the service of diversity, inclusion, and equity. So we can say that, in this one particular case, we didn’t follow our own rules and admit fault there.
4. This is so unfair. Why did he have to ruin it for everybody?Report
Well, yes I understand what the media is _letting the DA get away with saying_.
I’m pointing out the actual nonsense, where everyone pretends this system makes any sense at all and isn’t just pressure to make sure that poor people plea out to get out of prison because we simple do not have the justice system to handle them.
And I also find it rather amazing that DA can say ‘We should have kept this guy in prison by setting higher bail. [Saying, by implication, saying he would not be able to meet it]’.
Again, for people who do not know, there actually is a way to _deny_ bail, and that denial has specific rules and circumstances that vary from place to place. It can’t just be done randomly becase ‘bad person’. And bail is _not supposed to be_ unreachable, you are supposed to be able to afford your own bail.
Like…why is the DA getting away with saying things like that? Shouldn’t that stuff get brought up in bail hearings: My client cannot pay the bail by the DA’s office, and furthermore we assert the DA’s office has a _stated public position_ of recommending bail amounts it knows cannot be met as a way to illegally keep people in jail.Report
It should also be obvious that for every person released on bail who commits a crime, there are many others who are held in custody while being wholly innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever.
For some strange reason, those people never make national headlines.
And while we’re on this topic, maybe someone who has access to the OT archives can bring up some of our threads from the Ferguson protests, when it was revealed the pattern of predatory fines and fees imposed on the people by a government more interested in extracting money than protecting public safety.Report
Based upon watching the media over decades, this is a temporary situation and they’ll be back to standard operating procedures, i.e. getting it wrong, shortly.Report
Apparently someone looked at the path from the separate crime scene and there were 8 intersections over half a mile that he went through to get to the parade route.
I expect this story to disappear.Report
I can’t remember whether it was discussed here, but during the George Floyd riots, some protesters climbed onto the freeway in Seattle. In order to protect them, the police closed off all the entrance ramps.
However, they left at least one exit ramp open, and a driver going the wrong way struck two of the protesters, killing one. Their fellow travelers spent hours fantasizing about all the political points they were going to score from a white nationalist attack, until it turned out that the driver was a black African immigrant. I don’t think the full story ever came out, but I suspect that he was just going for a joyride on what he thought was an empty freeway.
Hanlon’s razor is remarkably effective.Report
Newsweek has an article explaining what we know about the suspect.Report
War on Christmas. Obvs.Report
People stepping up to help people: https://www.cbs58.com/news/high-school-student-uses-bilingual-skills-to-help-those-injured-in-waukesha-christmas-parade-tragedyReport
Holy fucknuggets: https://www.wisn.com/article/darrell-brooks-waukesha-christmas-parade-suspected-suv-driver-what-we-know/38322128?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot#
Good grief.Report
Bail has been set again, higher now, but still relatively low (given the offense):
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Is anyone going to try to justify this guy getting released if he has five million dollars?
If not, why is that his bail?
Do we really have a system where _this guy_ cannot legally be denied bail? He’s been charged with both bail jumping _and_ committing the same crime he was charged with the first time that he was out on bail for. And yet he still gets a dollar value for bail.
This entire system is literally incomprehensible and nonsensical, and obviously stupid.
This entire thing with him almost looks like some sort of false flag designed to make bail reform look stupid, despite the fact that pretty much everyone arguing for bail reform would say ‘Uh, yeah, people who have jumped bail and fled the first time probably shouldn’t get released.’.
I wish a billionaire would just come along and pay this guy’s bail right now, and say in response to the outrage ‘If you want to keep this guy in jail, you have to DO IT CORRECTLY.’.Report
These are excellent questions. If I were to try to throw together an answer, it’d probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of “we have a sixth amendment for a reason and we shouldn’t violate his rights just because he’s accused of a crime”.
But given what we’ve seen over the last month, I think that the real answer is that prosecutors suck.Report
I mean, that’s literally what judges and pre-trial hearings exist for: Does the government have enough of a case and there be enough of a requirement that it can temporarily violation the defendant’s rights _before_ he’s found guilty? (Be that via pre-trial detention or even a search warrant or whatever. Like, that’s the entire premise of having a judge involved.)
For some reason, we have built a system where judges misuse ‘impossible bail’ instead of ‘denying bail’ like they should, which is probably part of the corruption of the court system by a hell of a lot of money.
Because once you start operating in that system, it becomes nearly impossible to hold people with deep pockets in jail.
I find it really absurd that we’ve decided that getting out of pre-trial detention should be ‘hard’. (and by ‘hard’ we mean ‘expensive’) No. It should either be literally no problem at all, the court gives you a court date and lets you go…or it’s not allowed and you have to stay. The court should decide if you can get out or not, the idea of asking for you to _pay_ for it is just insane.
There is literally no explanation for this system besides ‘People with money do not wish to be held in jail when innocent so have created a system where they can purchase their freedom, while still keeping poor people in jail to pressure them to to sign plea bargains’.Report
And I think people, when talking about this system, often miss the ‘while still keeping poor people in jail to pressure them to to sign plea bargains’ part of this.
As I’ve said, if I had a billion dollars, I’d literally go pick a court jurisdiction, and pay the bail of every single person in pre-trial detention. Probably the local one, I dunno.
And I’d watch the entire court system in that jurisdiction melt down as people stop agreeing to plea bargains to get out of jail.
Because that’s literally how we’ve set up this system. Our courts are so backed up that we can use the threat of months of pre-trial detention as a way to force people to confess to crimes, innocent or guilty.
Sorry, let me amend: We use the threat of months of pre-trial detention as a way to force poor people to confess to crimes, innocent or guilty. Wealthy people can afford bail, and then wander around free for years while the court system crawls forward, and maybe their case just gets dismissed three years later.
So the system being completely non-funded besides the prisons and the police is doubly beneficial to the wealth: Not only does it mean the poor have to plead out, but the wealth can just drag trials out forever.
And so I’d pick one jurisdiction and let the poor people out, and watch the government crumple under the weight of trying to operate a _real_ justice system, where trials were actually held, and people had to be convicted of crimes instead of signing a piece of paper admitting guilt in exchange for any hope of ever getting out.Report
“They can put that in the ad!”Report
I, personally, think that this guy has demonstrated that his right to bail should no longer be recognized.
But if I wanted to put together an argument for why he should be offered bail anyway, that’s what I’d say.
Do you think that he should be released on bond? If not, why not? If so, is your argument why substantially different from the above?Report
I haven’t followed all the details nor do I know all the laws…
But, no, this does not seem like the kind of person who should be offered bail.
However, if his rights were being violated, his rights were being violated. I don’t know how grotesque his actions were… he still has rights.
So, I’d argue there was definitely one fuck up and possibly two:
Fuck Up the Definite: Not getting this guy to trial within the appropriate time frame.
Fuckup the Possible: Offering this guy bail if it was possible to deny him bail.Report
The culprit is named.
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Mistakes were made.
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“Multiple People Dead” is a normal Tuesday in America.Report
So game that out. Iterate the game a couple of times in your mental model.
Where does that end up?Report
A more polite society?Report
How accurate were your previous models?
Did you update them if they were off by more than a few degrees in any given direction?Report
They are playing out precisely as predicted.Report
Well, then.
There’s no reason to change your current model until it diverges from reality.Report
The DA addressed the question of how the bail was set so low for the guy in the first place.
Here’s the reason:
From another angle:
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