Last week, the Portland Police Bureau intervened in six street racing takeover attempts and arrested 15 in connection. These events have been on the rise nationally since the pandemic. Portland began a concentrated effort on these incidents in 2021. Commander Franz Schoening with PPB’s Specialized Resources Division joins us to share more about last week’s interventions and more.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with illegal street racing and street takeovers. The revving engines, squealing tires and out of control driving are fodder for social media. They can also lead to fatalities of drivers, of onlookers or, in one case, a woman who was just waiting at a bus stop. A week-and-a-half ago the Portland Police Bureau partnered with law enforcement agencies from around the metro area on a weekend long mission to disrupt a series of planned street racing events.
Franz Schoening was the leader of the mission. He is a commander for the bureau’s Specialized Resources Division and he joins us now. It’s good to have you on the show.
Franz Schoening: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: I want to start with what’s at stake in this. This is audio from a video that the Police Bureau put out last July. We’re going to hear Mike Currier, a sergeant in the North Precinct:
Mike Currier [recording]: … 9720 – and it’s going to be a fatal. This crash involved a motorcycle and an SUV. Unfortunately, the motorcycle rider didn’t make it. This was a fatal accident and it’s kind of all related to the street racing thing. The motorcycle rider was with a group associated with this street racing group of people. Then the driver of the SUV came up to come watch the event and unfortunately, they met in this intersection. And we have some just horrible consequences of that.
It’s been a busy night with these street racers and we did, I think, everything we could with the resources we had. And unfortunately, we have to end the night with a fatal car accident.
Miller: My guess is that, at this point, many Portlanders, many folks listening to us now, have either seen these events on social media, or in person, or perhaps they’ve just heard the revving engines of squealing tires in their neighborhoods. But for folks who haven’t yet, can you describe what they’re like?
Schoening: Sure. So these are incredibly dangerous events. The folks will come together along roadways or at intersections and they will shut down the roadways, either by parking cars in the roadways or standing in the roadways to spectate. And they’ll use these high-powered vehicles to engage in displays of speed and power, either drag racing or, in the case of the intersection, they’ll block an intersection. And [they’ll] conduct drifting where they rev the motor, and use the traction of the tires, and spin the cars in circles, incredibly close to pedestrians and spectators who are standing out there watching them.
There’s also a sense of lawlessness that goes along with it. They’ll use a lot of illegal fireworks. We know there are firearms present at these events. There have been shootings associated with these events. So they’re just incredibly dangerous for a number of reasons.
Miller: How big can these get?
Schoening: They really run the spectrum. We’ll have smaller events. We have local smaller clubs that will gather around these types of events. And then you’ll just have folks that encounter each other out there on the weekend nights or late at night and decide spontaneously to engage in a contest, if you will, of speed or power. But the smaller clubs will get together and bring in, sometimes, a couple dozen spectators or participants, all the way up to what we saw this past weekend with the West Coast Invitational. It was literally a call out to states all up and down the West Coast for folks, car clubs to come, spectators to come and engage in these events in the city of Portland.
Miller: And it was because of social media, you knew about that in advance. Can you give us a sense for the size of the police operation that you put together in response?
Schoening: Yeah, we had heard about this through a variety of means, people posting on social media. We partner with law enforcement agencies up and down the coast, so we share information as well. We expected upwards of over 1,000 participants for these events this past weekend. So when we got that information, we put together a planning process. We mobilized resources that, traditionally, we don’t have access to. We had people working on their days off across the weekend.
We activated our Rapid Response Team, which is newly reformed. We had about 30 of them out there this weekend, conducting enforcement activities. We had our Traffic Division. We had our Air Support Unit out, up and running. We had a lot of our investigative folks prepared to do the backend arrest processes when we made arrests for these cases. So a tremendous amount of resources were devoted to this mission.
Miller: What does that mean in terms of cost, in terms of overtime – as one way to think about it – but also the opportunity cost of what you couldn’t be doing with all of these resources brought to bear for these events?
Schoening: We haven’t tallied the final overtime costs for this mission. They were significant. There’s no doubt about that. In addition, we had to pull all available precinct resources. So patrol officers that would otherwise be responding to 911 calls, calls for service, simply weren’t able to get there as quickly and as timely as they would like to. We had minimum staffing for calls for service in order to conduct this mission, so a lot of lost opportunities there and tradeoffs.
But there’s also the priorities of these incredibly dangerous events. So we’re looking at limited resources across the Bureau. How do we assign those resources where it’s going to be the most impactful, the most meaningful, and address the most dangerous things that are happening. And that was a deliberate decision on our part. And not only ask our folks, many of them to come in on their days off, to do this work, but also to shift resources from normal patrol operations to this incredibly dangerous event.
Miller: We got a couple folks on Facebook who responded to this issue. Lucy Garrick wrote, “I hope the police keep it up. No one has the right to turn our streets into a racetrack, endangering the public. I wish they’d moved faster. But the past is over. They have things lined up now to hold these guys accountable.”
But Michael M. Soldati wrote this: “This is what our tax dollars go to? Who cares. Literally. Rampant auto theft and destruction of private property, and the city does nothing. I can’t even get the police to show up to a carjacking. But a couple of kids joy riding at night? Stop the presses!”
What’s your response to that last comment?
Schoening: Yeah, I understand. I mean, I wish we could do it all again. There are limited resources, and we really have to look at priorities. These are not just a couple of kids joyriding. We’ve seen fatal crashes, car crashes happen. We’ve had innocent bystanders caught up and killed because of the dangerous driving behavior. We’ve had injury shootings and homicides connected to these events. So they are absolutely life threatening events when they come together. So we have to assign the resources to reflect that. But I understand that there’s a tradeoff and that some of the things that are also important, we may not be able to get to quite as quickly. So it’s unfortunate, but that’s the environment we’re operating in today.
Miller: What were the results of the operation two weekends ago, in terms of things like arrests or citations or vehicles impounded?
Schoening: I’d say from just a strictly statistics point of view, we had 184 traffic stops conducted over the course of the weekend, 80 citations written to drivers, 29 arrests made for a variety of different offenses, and then 39 vehicles were towed, at least six of which I know we’re proceeding forward with forfeiting those vehicles and taking possession. So the owners will lose those permanently going forward. So that’s just the statistics. But I would also say there’s the intangibles. I think we sent a message, not only to the folks here in Portland but also up and down the coast, that we’re not gonna tolerate this sort of behavior in the metro area.
I think that the collaboration with our partner agencies – Multnomah County Sheriff’s office, Oregon State Police, Gresham Police Department, Port of Portland – even Washington County Sheriff’s office had someone in our command post helping coordinate things. I think the message sent that we’re not going to tolerate it and that we’re going to work together as a system to address it, was really powerful. So I don’t want to lose that either.
Miller: All of that that you’re talking about though, was made possible by this really concerted effort because of advance warning through social media for what seemed like, you knew in advance, was going to be a huge event. But what about smaller but still very disruptive, potentially very dangerous events that happen much more regularly and are more just hodgepodge or just happen out of nowhere?
Schoening: Yeah, that’s a great question. Obviously, the bigger the event, the more likely it is we’re gonna become aware of it and also the more important it is to really manage the Police Bureau’s response to that. For the smaller spontaneous events or the events that are just a small car club organizing this, sort of offline, we’re not gonna necessarily know about it ahead of time. And then we’re gonna be faced with the challenge of managing that with our on-duty police resources and precinct resources that are also responding to 911 calls for emergencies in progress.
So the supervisors who are working those nights are gonna be challenged to figure out how to prioritize the resources we’ve got and whether this speed racing activity reaches that threshold of being dangerous enough to pivot resources to address that. And there’s obviously in between – there’s going to be some events that we do become aware of that are still smaller in nature that we may not have quite as robust a response to. But we’re going to right size the response as best we can and never ignore it, if that makes sense.
Miller: I want to play one more clip from that PPB video that was put out last summer. This is again, Mike Currier, sergeant in the North Precinct:
Currier [recording]: Some of the other difficulties are, if we do address these guys, sometimes we can cause a bigger problem if we’ve got multiple people running at high speeds, running red lights. If the perception is that we’re pushing ‘em, we can cause more problems. We don’t want to push ‘em, and have them run red lights, and have them get into accidents and stuff like that. So we really have to be calculated in the decisions we make to solve the problem, not create a bigger one.
Miller: There have been a number of worst-case scenarios in the region this year with suspects fleeing traffic stops and then ending up in fatal crashes. It happened to two people a week-and-a-half ago after Gresham officers tried to pull them over. I know you can’t talk about that incident in particular. But broadly, what safe options do you have in terms of law enforcement, if pursuing drivers can, at times, be too unsafe?
Schoening: Yeah, that’s a fair question, Dave. Our policies outline when our members are allowed to engage in vehicle pursuits or not. We know that vehicle pursuits do involve some inherent risk. The challenge is, especially [with] these speed race events, where you have folks who are coming intentionally to engage in dangerous driving behavior, illegal behavior. They’re not necessarily going to be inclined to stop when we try to stop them and hold them accountable.
Miller: And many of them don’t have license plates. They’ve taken them off so you can’t identify them that way either for the future, right?
Schoening: Correct. So, what we do is we try to build in resources that make that mitigate those risks for pursuits. We had the airplanes up that night or that weekend. That allows us, if somebody does elude the police, to stop chasing them actively and allow the plane to follow them. Then, eventually, get some kind of pursuit intervention technique like spike strips or a different intervention technique in place, and get them to stop safely, and take them into custody, hold them accountable.
So it’s things like that, having canine units out there to help track folks who run from the car on foot, and then having enough police resources to get ahead of the pursuit and implement those intervention techniques. When you have all of those different strategies in place, it makes managing those pursuits a little bit less risky.
Miller: Given what we’re talking about here, the brazenness of this and the challenges in various ways for law enforcement, it seems like the best answer is to somehow prevent this in the first place, to change people’s behavior. Your hope is that enforcement could lead to that. But what about even further upstream things? I mean, how do you change people’s behavior so they’re less likely to want to engage in this?
Schoening: Boy, if I had the answer to that question, I’d be writing a book. You know, it’s tough. Social media is driving a lot of it. Like you said, I think what we find – and this is to step a little bit outside my police role and just kind of speak as a member of the community – media and social media seems to drive outrageous behavior, drives more clicks, more likes, more subscriber content. [This], in turn, generates revenue or monetizes the behavior through either ad revenue or merchandizing, that kind of stuff, which is some of what we see with the speed racing. So until society gets away from that, I don’t know that we’re gonna be able to change it.
Miller: Franz Schoening, thanks very much.
Schoening: You’re welcome. Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Franz Schoening is the commander for PPB’s Specialized Resources Division.
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