Over Labor Day weekend last year, streets across the city erupted in chaos. Throughout each night, drivers performed burnouts, skidded across intersections and spun donuts as fireworks shot into the air. In some cases, fires were set. Boisterous crowds ringed the intersections to watch, cheer on the drivers and livestream the action, often coming dangerously close to the speeding cars. In the morning after these so-called street takeovers, the intersections bore the black rings of tire skid marks.
Takeovers had been building across the city, but that holiday weekend, activity hit a fever pitch. The Milwaukee Police Department responded to nearly 20 street takeovers, including one Downtown at Sixth and Clybourn streets.
The city’s response to this new strain of reckless driving has been to toughen laws, including new fines of up to $1,000 for organizers and spectators. It’s also installed traffic calming measures like speed humps – especially effective at another street scourge, drag racing – and seized vehicles involved in takeovers. Police are continually monitoring social media to keep tabs on when and where street takeovers might take place.
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A year after the crackdown, the problematic and dangerous activity has continued, but seemingly to a lesser extent, leaving Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson convinced the measures have had a positive effect. “If they hadn’t, I’m sure we’d be hearing more about them,” he says. The activity “incites fear and chaos in the communities they disrupt,” he says, “and they negatively affect the quality of life of those living in neighborhoods where these dangerous events occur.”
After perhaps the highest-profile takeover yet, outside City Hall in April, police arrested 23-year-old Ricky Alcantara-Hernandez for instigating and organizing street takeover events that month. He was charged with three felony counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety and unrelated drug and weapons charges that could send him to prison for up to 43 years if convicted. “This was a ringleader for street takeovers that was identified, arrested and charged. That’s great,” the mayor says. “Anybody that causes instances of harm, destruction or even death in our community, and that’s what street takeovers fall into, then they should be held to account, and that’s exactly what’s happened.”
But the arrest hasn’t ended the takeovers entirely. In June, a new incident occurred at the intersection of 12th and Mitchell on the South Side. This Labor Day weekend, an MPD crackdown stopped more than 100 vehicles, towed six of them and issued 126 citations to takeover spectators.
The noisy and chaotic streets have been a source of frustration for Troy Bankord, who moved to Milwaukee several months ago, settling into an upper-floor apartment in a Downtown building near the lakefront. Since, he’s seen from his windows street takeovers, loud music blasting from motorcycles, cars noisily peeling out of intersections, and vehicles drag racing along Prospect Avenue and Lincoln Memorial Drive. He has dozens of videos as proof.
“I spent 25 years in the Phoenix area and never have I heard the noise levels there that I hear here,” says Bankord. “There seems to be no interest by our police department or sheriff’s department to pull people over for exceedingly loud and obnoxious vehicles, speeding or drag racing.”
