Brookfield residents who live near Candy Cane Park on the north side of town say they’ve witnessed a long pattern of unsafe traffic in the otherwise quiet area, as drivers use residential streets to avoid the nearby artery of Maple Avenue.
Mike and Corrie Mieszczak, who live at the corner of 28th Street and Park Avenue immediately northwest of the park, said they’ve consistently seen drivers ignore stop signs in the 13 years they’ve lived in Brookfield.
“For quite a while, we had a chair right in front of this big picture window in our front, and I used to sit there and have my morning coffee,” Mike Mieszczak told the Landmark. “There are stop signs pretty much on the corner here and the next block over, and I see a lot of rolling stops go right through. Nobody would do a full-on, complete stop. You’d see that quite regularly.”
Despite complaints from residents in the area, Brookfield police said traffic data from 2024 and 2025 shows no need for additional enforcement measures.
“People speed down Park because they’re trying to bypass Maple Avenue, and they also speed down 28th Street. We’ve had issues with people going through the stop sign. There have been instances where I’ve witnessed people drive around a stopped school bus with the arm out,” said one resident on the 9100 block of 28th Street, across the street from Candy Cane Park, which was refurbished in 2022. “The police department will send an officer to sit at the park and watch the area for about a week, maybe two weeks, and then that’s it until we complain again.”
The resident, who initially reached out to the Landmark about the issue, asked to remain anonymous for fear of potential retaliation from officials.
She said another neighbor convinced the department to put up a speed monitor to track cars in the area but that she never heard the results of the study.
“Other people have tried to rally to get a joint effort from neighbors because our thought was, instead of coming to them one-by-one, where they continually dismiss us, if we come to them as a group, maybe they’ll pay attention,” she said.
The resident said neighbors have worked together to submit and boost reports through SeeClickFix, an online portal that allows Brookfield residents to report issues to the village, to request permanent changes like new signage or speed bumps, which have “continuously been denied from the village. The village states that they won’t do speed bumps because of snowplows. They don’t see the need for additional signage,” she said.
Terry Schreiber, one of Brookfield’s two deputy police chiefs, said SeeClickFix is operated by the public works department.
“If it is any type of a public safety immediacy concern — they’re reporting a burglary or a theft, or that this intersection is so dangerous and needs something — that’s really not what SeeClickFix is specifically for,” he said. Those kinds of complaints “do get sent to us from public works … and then we’ll look at it, whatever it is. We know that, if it’s been sent to us, then we’re the one that is responsible for sending out whatever disposition or investigating whatever the matter is.”
Schreiber said Brookfield police first heard complaints from residents related to traffic safety near Candy Cane Park around February or March 2024. In response to those complaints, Schreiber said the department took similar actions to those the anonymous resident described, including traffic details from officers and a covert radar monitoring unit tracking drivers’ speeds.
He said 65 traffic details were performed across 2024 and 2025 in a mix of marked and unmarked vehicles to account for the effect visible police presence has on drivers’ behavior. They were conducted at different times of day and lasted anywhere from 10 minutes to more than an hour depending on when other calls for service would call the officer away.
“Over those 65 different [details], there was one time that they documented where somebody rolled through the stop sign, and they conducted a traffic stop at that point in time,” he said. “Is that organic? Yes, sometimes. No, sometimes.”
Despite the department’s data, the residents say they feel it’s an issue that is out of control.
“We’ve often talked about, if there was just a cop that would sit halfway down our block, they could get their quota in tickets quickly,” Corrie Mieszczak said. “It’s this morning traffic and evening, when people are avoiding Maple and 31st. They don’t care. I get it, as a driver. You need to get wherever, but these are neighborhoods where kids live. There are bus stops all around Candy Cane Park every morning, and there are tons of kids here all the time, and it’s really scary.”
To better track organic traffic in the area, Schreiber said the department put up a covert radar unit from March 5-25, 2025.
“It monitored 6,340 cars that went down Park Avenue and that would have been at that intersection of Park and 28th. Now, we can’t tell [adherence to stop signs] from that, but … the average speed of those cars was 14 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone,” he said.
The anonymous resident said she also experienced issues with parked cars blocking her car from exiting the driveway. While Mike Mieszczak hadn’t experienced that, he agreed street parking along 28th Street often fills up during baseball games at Candy Cane Park.
Schreiber said that Brookfield, as a non-home rule municipality, must follow state statue on the matter due to a lack of local ordinance. Illinois law says cars are allowed to park all the way up to a curb cut. While residents have asked police to put up signs or paint curbs to discourage the behavior, Schreiber said the village has no statutory basis to do so.
“There’s no ordinance or process to back up what that curb painting would be,” he said. “If we did that in that area for those residents, we’d have to do it in every other area that residents would request that people don’t park right up to their driveway.”
Schreiber said many complaints from residents have been discussed by Brookfield’s traffic safety committee, comprised of one staff member each from the village’s police, fire, public works and community development departments. Due to the data the police department has collected, the committee has found no permanent action is needed to quell traffic around Candy Cane Park.
“We certainly take every request seriously. We want to make sure that there’s nothing more that we can do in a matter, even if it’s a situation that we can’t do something ordinance- or signage-based or possibly infrastructure-based, we can still do things on an enforcement level,” he said. “It’s still something that we’re concerned about and want to see what part we can do in making that area safer.”
Still, residents say they worry it will take a preventable tragedy before the village takes their suggestions to slow traffic.
“The police here have been really great. They have a very strong presence [in the neighborhood]. It’s clear that they are responsible to us, and they want to keep things safe around here. It’s just the continued lack of attention to the stop signs and driver behavior,” Corrie Mieszczak said. “You’d hate for somebody to get hurt. You’d hate for a tragedy to happen for something has silly as cars being selfish and not stopping.”
