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MILWAUKEE - Are the park-and-ride lots safe? The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department patrols 10 county-owned lots. But the sheriff is now refusing to patrol seven other lots that are owned by the state of Wisconsin. The sheriff claims state troopers should patrol those lots. "We are talking about state-owned lots. These are not county lots. It's not county property," Kim Brooks, public information officer for the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department, said. "Our hands are full dealing with the problems we have on county-owned lots." Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke said he wants the Wisconsin State Patrol to police the state-owned lots. But they said Sheriff Clarke cannot tell them to start patrolling because Wisconsin law says they are "not legally allowed to investigate criminal activity." In addition, the Wisconsin State Patrol doesn't have any resources allotted to Milwaukee County. Their closest station is in Waukesha County, so some people who use state-owned park-and-rides are afraid if something happened, it would take too long until a state trooper arrived. "Whatever could happen or does happen is going be gone 40 to 45 minutes later," Wayne Dhein said. Dhein is a bus driver for All State Lines. He uses park-and-rides daily, and said he's noticed a spike in suspicious activity since word got out that sheriff's deputies wouldn't respond. "There does have to be somebody at least going through once in a while, to keep things in order." Sheriff Clarke has been asking the state to take over the patrolling of the lots and has also been asking for surveillance cameras to be installed to curb crime in the lots. When the state did not respond to either request, Clarke stopped his patrols on May 1. "We can't be everywhere. We need help. And we need the state to help police state park-and-ride lots," Brooks said. When TODAY'S TMJ4 reporter Heather Shannon asked Brooks, "What if the state says, we're not going to do that?" Brooks said, "Then I guess we're in the situation that we're in." The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department will still respond to emergency calls involving threats to people. But they will not respond to "property related crimes." Meaning, if your car is stolen or gets broken into, you could have a hard time getting someone to respond.