Who's in charge?

Comments like this don't exactly breed confidence in law enforcement.

The police response to a weekend rampage by about 60 young people who beat and robbed a smaller group that had been watching fireworks from Kilbourn Reservoir Park "may not have been our finest hour," Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn told an audience Wednesday evening.

Flynn's comment preceded an account of the assault by a woman who was among the victims. The woman, who identified herself only as Jessica, drew applause from the crowd of about 200 after describing how police made her and her friends feel at fault for simply enjoying a holiday weekend at a public park.

"They told us to leave and started kicking us out of the park," she told the audience at the Gordon Park pavilion.

"It was then that we realized that no one got a chance to make statements except the two who required medical attention, even though there were 19 of us who had witnessed something a bit different. They did not even take our names and phone numbers to call us at a later time."

Maybe if the aforementioned Jessica was of the McBride variety, Flynn would think a more forceful response was warranted.

And then there's this priceless nugget:

Full reports include details about other crimes that happened at the time of the robberies, Flynn said. Once he and others read that information, they passed it along to the media, he said.

"It wasn't an attempt to downplay or minimize or deny the concern about what we ultimately learned," he said.

Flynn added that the first priority for police at the scene of the beatings had not been to make arrests, but to disperse the crowd and tend to victims. Making arrests would have taken much-needed police officers away from the areas where they were needed, he said.

So a mob of unruly black youth descend upon a park and start beating up a bunch of people watching fireworks, and Flynn's concern is that making arrests in a racially-tinged mob beatdown would take police officers away from where they were needed? Was something worse happening in his fair city that his department couldn't allocate adequate resources to this matter?

I've been asserting on this blog on and off for 5+ years that Milwaukee is a hopeless dump that should simply be bulldozed into Lake Michigan. I am still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.