The vagaries of elections are such that this post is about five or six elections (depending on how many candidates show up) from now, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

With the 2016 mayoral election nearly two long years away, south side Ald. Bob Donovan told several hundred cheering friends and supporters Tuesday night that he will challenge Mayor Tom Barrett.

Donovan, a four-term alderman and a frequent critic of the mayor on such hot-button issues as public safety and the streetcar project, made his announcement official Tuesday night at a rally at American Serb Hall, 5101 W. Oklahoma Ave.

Donovan said Milwaukee’s greatest challenge was “timidity of leadership” and emphasized the point later, referring to the “muck and mire of indecision and timidity.”

Earlier in the day, he filed papers with the Milwaukee Election Commission. …

Donovan … said the city’s major issues are public safety, MPS and the city’s infrastructure. Tuesday night, he said the city was in “serious, serious trouble.” He said as mayor he would take Milwaukee off “autopilot” and “make waves.”

Earlier, Donovan acknowledged that Barrett has hired more officers — a total of 120 are scheduled to be added to the force by the end of the year. But he said the new hirings do not take into account police retirements and unfilled positions.

“Where we fall short in my estimation is not getting enough boots on the street,” Donovan said. …

In addition to Donovan, Ald. Joe Davis, another frequent Barrett critic, especially on the issue of economic development, has said he will form an exploratory committee for mayor. And Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has indicated he will make a decision this year whether to challenge Barrett. Clarke is seeking re-election against challenger Chris Moews.

Donovan is not necessarily correct about needing more “cops on the street.” Facebook Friend Glenn Frankovis (who is more qualified to be police chief of Milwaukee than the current police chief of Milwaukee) points out that at $75,000 per officer, increasing the number of police officers beyond what Barrett apparently is doing would cost tens of millions of dollars and make police protection the number one budget area in the city. (Which wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing.)

Frankovis is a supporter of Donovan. Frankovis’ point is that police need to be deployed better, saturating high-crime areas, and not just for a few weeks. Frankovis did that as a police captain, and why current chief Ed Flynn refuses to do that is impossible to understand.

In fact, all Flynn does is parrot Barrett, engage in the usual gun-control claptrap, and complain about the state Legislature. Media Trackers reports on a leader of the latter:

In a fiery press release Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) punched back at Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn regarding claims that the state legislature had a role to play in this summer’s rash of violent crimes in Milwaukee.

Citing laws passed by the Republican controlled legislature, and signed by Gov. Scott Walker, Fitzgerald noted, “Even with targeted state dollars being funneled directly to Milwaukee, the city continues to see disturbing rates of violent crime far out of line with the rest of the state.” Fitzgerald pointed to funding heroin treatment programs, expanding the state’s Treatment and Diversion programs to target alcohol addiction, developing ‘swift and certain sanctions’ for parole and probation violations and increased protections for victims of domestic violence as specific cases where the state directly helped the city.

Fitzgerald also noted that the state even spent $175,000 of state taxpayer funds to expand the Milwaukee’s ShotSpotter crime detection technology.

Citing data from a Media Trackers report, Fitzgerald blamed Milwaukee’s violent crime problem on the Milwaukee criminal justice system’s “overreliance on plea bargaining” and weak sentencing, which he says creates a “revolving door of criminals who serve short stints behind bars only to wind up back in court for new – often more serious – crimes.”

In June, Media Trackers ran a report showing that between June and August of last summer 33 individuals were charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide or felony murder in Milwaukee. The 33 individuals had a combined criminal history of 76 prior felony charges and 35 prior felony convictions.

Last week Flynn called into Midday with Charlie Sykes on AM620 and blamed the Wisconsin legislature for making Milwaukee judges and police “prisoners of the laws as written.” But as Media Trackers showed in our report, 10 of the 16 individuals that used a gun to commit a homicide/murder were previous felons and committing a felony simply by having the gun they used in their crimes.

Media Trackers also reported that 15 of the 33 individuals whose cases had concluded received a combined 220 years in prison and 128 years of extended supervision of the 952 years of imprisonment they were eligible for. Thirteen of the 15 cases had also been plea bargained.

Conservative Consigliere picks apart Flynn:

And so we have come to the end with Milwaukee Police Ed Flynn.  No, Chief Flynn has not officially tendered his resignation.   However, if you listened closely in hisradio interview with Charlie Sykes late last week the Chief unmistakably and irrevocably waved the white flag in his war on crime in Milwaukee.

His surrender didn’t come in the inevitable and predictable finger pointing at Madison or his clichéd calls for more gun laws.   No, Chief Flynn officially cried “uncle” to the bad guys when he argued that Milwaukee could not be held to the same standards of safety as the suburbs because the suburbs don’t have the same levels of poverty as Milwaukee.   When a Police Chief who rode into town with a law and order, broken windows philosophy and a strong message of “Poverty doesn’t cause crime, crime causes poverty,” devolves into, ‘When the suburbs have the same poverty levels as Milwaukee then suburban lawmakers can criticize our public safety situation,’ he is beaten – utterly and thoroughly beaten.   He has unconditionally surrendered.
It is sad. In his early years in Milwaukee Chief Flynn showed great promise. He was a no-excuses leader. He refused to parrot the fatalistic liberal platitudes about race, poverty and crime. His hallmark was visible
presence, community engagement, and zero tolerance. He looked to modernize the police department’s thinking and attitudes at the same time he was dragging it technologically into the 21st Century. He viewed public safety as a necessary condition for economic growth and job creation in the city, not vice versa.

All this started to change, however, with his highly-publicized sexual indiscretions and the subsequent controversy that suggested his department might have been cooking the books internally to make the city’s violent crime statistics look rosier than they actually were. These twin scandals gave his political masters in City Hall all the public relations cover they needed to get rid of him. To keep his job, Chief Flynn has had to toady up to the Mayor and the rest of Milwaukee’s liberal political establishment and be their trained parrot, squawking back whatever they say in his shiny police plumage.
He poses with them while they blame the state’s concealed carry law for Milwaukee shootings – despite the fact that none of our recent shootings have involved anyone holding a concealed carry permit.

He points fingers with them at Republicans in Madison and demands stronger sentences for gun crimes, but refuses to say a peep about the Milwaukee liberal political establishment in the District Attorney’s office and the Circuit Court that plays catch and release with the criminals his officer arrest under the state’s existing laws.

He suggests the needs for higher mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, but he is unwilling to push back on or to point out the absurdity to the large-scale community movement here in Milwaukee decrying high incarceration rates for urban youth – exactly the kind of individuals who would be most dramatically impacted by the sort of mandatory minimum sentences he is proposing. …
Flynn’s recent p.r. stunt to make one section of the city “as safe as the suburbs for a day” was a humiliating admission that his police force is impotent to make all of Milwaukee safe on any sort of consistent basis.   With that admission, he has officially relegated his department’s role to one of a disaster cleanup crew controlled by the whimsy of demography and current events rather than a public safety organization in control of its own turf.

Crime is really the number one problem in Milwaukee. Barrett excuses it away with the usual poverty-as-cause liberal claptrap. There are poor places (by the traditional income-based definitions of poverty) elsewhere in Wisconsin, but with nowhere remotely near Milwaukee’s crime rates. And in its vast array of social ills, Milwaukee is dragging down the rest of Wisconsin.

But you’ll never hear Trolley Tom admit that. Frankovis said on Facebook:

The issue that should be in the mayoral race isn’t something the mayor controls — education, specifically the state of Milwaukee Public Schools, the state’s biggest spending,  yet worst by far, school district. Barrett has done nothing about MPS, and has not even tried to get the Legislature to give the mayor control over MPS. (That would be the fastest bill the Legislature ever passed if Barrett just asked for it.) Donovan should campaign on getting mayoral control and the ability to hire and fire MPS employees.

Donovan, by the way, is so suddenly popular that he has his own Facebook meme:

(For those who don’t know, Flynn and Barrett are standing behind Donovan.)

I don’t know if Donovan is a Republican, or if he is even a conservative. (The bet is that he’s not a Democrat given that the head of the Democratic Party of Milwaukee County apparently said several nasty things about Donovan.) I know nothing about Davis. I know a fair amount about Clarke, but electoral politics says there needs to be one non-Barrett, whether that’s Donovan or Clarke, to get Mayor Milquetoast out of office.