Lt. D.G. Schoeppner is Tucker’s liaison to the DeKalb County Police Department and can be followed at facebook.com/dgschoeppner or emailed at dgschoeppner@dekalbcountyga.gov.
In the past couple of years, street racing in metro Atlanta has captured quite a bit of attention. From racing on the interstates to groups taking over roadways and parking lots for burnouts, it has been a growing problem; so much that several municipalities and even the state legislature have created laws to address it. Far be it for me to complain about having more tools available to combat crime, but this month we are going to talk about how we got here and why I don’t think adding more laws is going to achieve the outcome that people desire.
Believe it or not, street racing has always been a problem. When I started here in DeKalb County, most of our problems were on Moreland Avenue out by I-285. Groups would race on the roadway and gather in the parking lots of the industrial businesses on Sunday nights. The police from DeKalb, Atlanta and Clayton County would take turns running them off from their areas. After a while the groups would disperse and no longer be a problem. Back then this area was still kind of out of the way. But as the metro area has grown and more people have been attracted to racing groups, the size of the groups and the number of days they meet has increased.
Social media has been a large contributor to this increase. The organizers of these groups use it to coordinate and promote their events. Some of these groups have grown to be hundreds strong. One social media post can get just about the whole group at a single location in a very short amount of time. This means the police can’t just disperse the group a couple of times to make it go away. It is very easy for them to regroup in a different spot and continue as long as they’d like.
Then there is the reason why I think adding more laws is fruitless. Many of these street racers have absolutely no regard for the law or the safety of others. When we arrive to break up their gatherings, they will take whatever steps necessary to get away. They don’t care if anyone else is hurt or property is damaged in the process. Then consider that the police are held responsible for any injures or damage that may occur. This makes it near impossible to make arrests. About the only time it happens is when the racing groups pick a spot or flee to an area where they can be trapped and they give up. This happens very infrequently.
No one hopes that I am wrong about this more than me. In the meantime, the police will continue to do everything we can do to combat this problem. That includes monitoring social media channels to get a jump start on planned racing outings, as well as trying to bust these outings up as we can. However, until these folks learn to respect our society’s laws and the safety of their fellow man, it is going to be an uphill battle.
