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MAD MAX AT LAKE GENEVA!

Democracy is coming to the USA’ is a very famous and brilliantly written song phrase about how real pure democracy can be a pretty violent exercise of governmental form.  Rule by crowd control is not really democracy, but a form of dangerous chaos.  What’s going on in Lake Geneva as this critical summer comes into fruition?

 Last weekend was nearly a perfect storm of applied and potentially dangerous chaos.  A group of about a hundred bikers basically took over the downtown, obeying no traffic control devices, and acting like a bunch of drunken horses-asses.    Old muscle cars accompanying the bikers did smoking peel-outs right on Broad Street during the day and when the sun went down the usual “Midnight Special” purveyors of ever more alcohol began to contribute to the overall chaos.

This coming weekend is the city’s Memorial Day celebration of reverence for our country’s war dead.  Did this motorcycle gang come to Lake Geneva on its first summer-like day to check it out for more visits in the future?  If it was like that, and these people certainly acted like one of the motorcycle gangs mostly seen in this area at movie theaters or on television (think Hell’s Angels, the Diablos, or Bandidos), then were they not on a reconnaissance expedition to see if they could find a beautiful place to return to and take over, once again?

Lake Geneva’s police department is not staffed to accommodate hundreds of bad actors, especially when those bad actors are loaded on booze, or whatever, and have such an easy means of immediate escape from whatever aftermath of the bad deeds they might commit.  Lake Geneva only has 16 full-time patrol officers, of which those 16 are divided into three parts to run the three shifts required to provide 24-hour-a-day coverage.  The department has only two reserve officers (it used to have 27).  With 18 officers then, and presuming four can cover midnight to eight a.m., and six the four to midnight shift, that leaves eight officers for support during normal daylight hours, if all those officers are active, not on vacation or off duty due to injury or illness.  The small number of officers left could not have handled the nightmare on Wrigley without substantial backup.

Those people and the GSR staff were there among them, were not the kind of citizens normally associated with resort visitors or the locals.  For the most part, those cyclists were not like the more usual Harley riders the town is often visited by.  These riders were mean-spirited, filled with strangely misplaced anger, and looking for trouble.  Gage Marine is upset with what happened, as are some of the owners of restaurants on Wrigley Drive.

In Waco, Texas, back in 2015, nine people were murdered and fourteen injured when such a group of bikers managed to take over.  The people who did the killing and maiming were never brought to justice, as Waco did not have Lake Geneva’s video and news coverage.  Mike Rasmussen, the Chief of Police in Lake Geneva, is fully aware of what happened this last weekend, and what the potential for trouble is during this next three-day Memorial weekend.  The City of Lake Geneva should start giving serious thought to requiring that these ‘fests’ being put on during the spring and summer months should no longer be supported with tax dollars (the organizers get between ten and twenty thousand per fest), instead they should be charged for the increased security the community needs to protect its citizens.

The Wine Walk is mightily successful, but it should also be charged as it is encouraging, and then supporting, putting a whole lot of imbibed people out on the sidewalks and streets.  For all those who visit the downtown on a regular basis in good weather times it is very apparent that Lake Geneva does not need more visitors, so why pay to get more?  Chicago ‘found’ Lake Geneva during the pandemic and it’s coming in force this summer (those bikers were all from Chicago).  The Geneva Shore Report will be on hand all of Memorial Day weekend to video, report, record, and maintain imagery and records of all that goes on in the downtown area.  Local citizens own the city, and they should never be in fear of visiting the downtown area because of miscreant bad-acting, and even violent, visitors.