{"id":4474,"date":"2023-07-27T20:02:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T20:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4474"},"modified":"2023-07-27T22:19:32","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T22:19:32","slug":"one-badger-institute-staffers-personal-experience-with-the-kia-boyz-crime-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4474","title":{"rendered":"One Badger Institute staffer\u2019s personal experience with the Kia Boyz crime wave"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/my-milwaukee-experience-with-the-kia-boyz-crime-wave\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The healthy fear Milwaukee needs to curb unbridled car theft<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

You know those decals that make your car look like it\u2019s been hit by gunfire?<\/p>\n

\n
\"Bullet<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

My family\u2019s car has something like that, only more authentic: a bullet hole in the tailgate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a souvenir of the car\u2019s week-long absence, that and the smashed window, the traumatized bumpers, the demolished ignition switch, the rifled personal belongings.<\/p>\n

The car was stolen.<\/p>\n

Classic story, according to the clucks of sympathy from the cops who found it a week later. They found the car stashed on a Sunday afternoon in underbrush behind a charred vacant house near Locust St. and Fond du Lac Ave. in Milwaukee.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did it get there?\u201d asked the tow-truck dispatcher. Answer: We parked it on a Saturday afternoon along a busy downtown street near Bastille Days. Yes, it\u2019s a Kia.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat happens,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But why? It\u2019s nothing flashy, yet it got boosted. Whose fault is that?<\/p>\n

Not Kia\u2019s. The City of Milwaukee is\u00a0suing<\/a>\u00a0the carmaker, as are other jurisdictions where authorities failed to protect citizens and need to deflect the heat. In May, Kia and Hyundai\u00a0paid<\/a>\u00a0some law-degreed lamprey with a nationwide class-action $200 million to buzz off. All the suits claim that because Kias use keys to start \u2014 rather than costlier keys-with-chips \u2014 they\u2019re practically inviting youthful miscreants to become thieving\u00a0Kia Boyz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve had this Kia for three years. The first two, we lived in northern Virginia. It didn\u2019t get stolen there \u2014 because there was no wave<\/a> of car thefts there. Its supposedly flawed key raised no steal-me flag in the Fox Valley, either, where Mrs. McIlheran parked it each workday. Ditto our driveway: If our Kia was so attractive to theft, why did no one try that in our small town?<\/p>\n

It was only in Milwaukee, where the car-theft rate is about 16 times what it was in the rest of Wisconsin, according to state figures<\/a> \u2014 or three times what it was in the same city<\/em> in 2017. It\u2019s not the car that\u2019s changed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the fault of Milwaukee. The people who own the neatly gardened houses across the alley cannot be pleased that the abandoned duplex behind them attracts people dumping trash and stolen wheels. Can we blame the abandoned house\u2019s owner? That\u2019s the City of Milwaukee, so maybe it should sue itself.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the Milwaukee Police\u2019s fault. They\u2019re doing the best they can with ranks more than 20% thinner<\/a> than they were two decades ago, and in a city beset by crime far above<\/a> five years ago. I\u2019m grateful for the sharp-eyed Officer B., who spotted my Kia amid the box elders, then waited for me to show up.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t the fault of videos. Milwaukee documentarian<\/a> Thomas \u201cTommy G\u201d Gerszewski in 2022 interviewed<\/a> teens who admitted to car theft in a video that got 7 million views, but if anything, he reveals the thieves as witless punks deserving the scorn that adult interviewees gave them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a choice<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Whose fault is it, then?<\/p>\n

\n
\"Damaged<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know his name, because the cops haven\u2019t caught him, but some damn fool made the decision to steal our car. It\u2019s his fault, the guy who chose to learn how to use a USB cable to fool the ignition, who chose to loot the glovebox, who took the EZPass transponder, who stole a set of choirbooks, who swiped the holy card bearing the image called Divine Mercy<\/a> from where Mrs. McIlheran left it on the visor. Perhaps he felt watched.<\/p>\n

Among what the thief and his friends left were an empty blunt package, a used condom and an empty handgun magazine, now in police custody. I do not know the order in which these vices were indulged, but they don\u2019t portend a trouble-free future. As the older Milwaukee gent interviewed by Gerszewski put it, \u201cStop before you get killed or kill everybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words: You all need Jesus. Hope you kept the holy card, thief.<\/p>\n

Or looked in the choirbooks. The bookmark in one was set for the chants of the week. See the one that starts, \u201cVenite<\/em>, filii<\/em>\u2026\u201d and ponder the translation: \u201cCome, children, hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

How about fear of the law?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Failing that, fear of the law will do. We can demand that authorities try instilling that.<\/p>\n

Thanks to that video, cops found one thief, then 17, who stole a rental car, driving it madly across lawns. Unfortunately, while Markell Hughes could have gotten<\/a> 22 years in prison, last month he was sentenced to one<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thefts are the fault of the thief, but our justice system surely could do its part. I can\u2019t improve on the Milwaukee man who told Gerszewski, \u201cTo try to make a difference, you\u2019ve got to start by making examples.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, too, the city can hire more police. The Common Council can stop blaming cars.<\/p>\n

As for my family, it\u2019s pretty clear. We can rethink just how much we want to visit Bastille Days or do anything else in a city that isn\u2019t taking car theft seriously enough.<\/p>\n

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

The post One Badger Institute staffer\u2019s personal experience with the Kia Boyz crime wave<\/a> appeared first on Badger Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/my-milwaukee-experience-with-the-kia-boyz-crime-wave\/ The healthy fear Milwaukee needs to curb unbridled car…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-badger-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4474"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4479,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474\/revisions\/4479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}