As Wisconsin GOP gubernatorial nominee Tim Michels was about to give a press conference in Milwaukee on Thursday, a man broke into and attempted to steal a car across the street.
News crews were setting up in preparation for Michels’s 10 a.m. briefing Thursday, where he received an endorsement from the Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association, when a black SUV pulled alongside a white Kia sedan, according to surveillance video obtained by FOX6 News Milwaukee. A man climbed out and smashed the window of the adjacent vehicle and appeared to attempt to steal it. A brick was found in the passenger’s seat of the Kia later on, Fox 6 reported.
The man jumped through the window of the car headfirst, turned the engine on, as well as the windshield wipers, and backed the car up until it stopped moving. About a minute and a half later, the black SUV circled back. The man casually got out of the Kia and walked to the SUV, fleeing the area, the video shows. Michels told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday night that criminals, from his observations, tend to target Kias because it’s “easy to hot-wire them.”
Michels has touted himself as a tough-on-crime candidate and has accused his opponent, incumbent Democratic governor Tony Evers, of weak leadership and lax law enforcement that has fueled anarchy in Milwaukee.
“Middle of the day, people everywhere, the crime in Milwaukee has to stop. This is what happens when you have weak leadership like Governor Evers and Mandela Barnes,” Michels said in a statement video after his presser. “The bad guys, they’re so emboldened. They’re like, ‘I don’t care if there’s cameras around, people around, future governors around,’ whatever; they’re going to get away with it.”
Shootings and homicides have surged in Milwaukee this year. It is experiencing the largest increase in shootings in the nation, according to a midyear analysis of 24 large cities by the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice.
“We’re definitely headed in the wrong direction. We take it very seriously,” Milwaukee assistant police chief Paul Formolo told Time magazine last week about the crime spike. “We started seeing this rapid increase right around when COVID started, and I think what we’re seeing now is some of the residuals from that.”