Cities Must Respond to the Dirt-Bike Crisis
In recent years, big cities have been plagued by roving packs of young men on dirt bikes and ATVs who ignore traffic laws and terrorize the streets. Residents are asking how to fix this problem – but they are asking the wrong question. They need to ask, rather, if controlling the urban disorder of lawless motor bikes, trash-strewn lots, and shoplifting might also be a key to halting the skyrocketing rates of homicides and shootings in American cities.
Anyone who lives in a big city these days has seen the scores of dirt-bike and ATV riders hitting the streets at night. For those who don’t live in the urban centers, YouTube is full of highlight videos of young men performing tricks and ignoring traffic laws in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities. Even small cities like Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Flint, Michigan, are seeing the same phenomenon.
These mobile gangs are a problem for pedestrians and other motorists. In one city, a young woman was walking to her car when a dirt-bike rider trying to perform a trick lost control of his bike and hit the woman in the head. The driver took off; the young woman died. In another city, a 14-year-old illegally driving a dirt bike ran a stop sign and killed a pedestrian, a Marine reservist.
It’s not only ordinary citizens who are in danger from these out-of-control packs. The participants themselves are hurt or killed on a regular basis. One dirt-bike driver shot through a stop sign and died when he collided with a car. In a recent incident in Baltimore, a dirt-bike driver was hit by a fire truck responding to a call. The dirt-bike driver was dragged underneath the truck and died at the scene.
In addition to the dangers they present, these crews of disorderly bikers terrorize city inhabitants. Pedestrians can’t walk on the sidewalks because the bikers use the sidewalks as often as the roads. People in cars are at risk every time they go through an intersection. Forget about trying to put kids to bed at night with the sound of hundreds of dirt bikes screaming across the neighborhood.
These off-road dirt bikes and ATVs are illegal on city streets. Even street-legal motor bikes are often unregistered and operating without inspection. So it should be relatively easy for the police to stop the drivers, impound the bikes, and reestablish safety on the streets – right?
Not so fast. In places like Philadelphia and St. Paul, progressive city councils and radical prosecutors won’t allow the police to enforce what they call “minor” traffic violations. These politicians claim that enforcement of normal traffic laws unfairly affects minority populations, turning a blind eye to violations of the law.
If woke politicians would let police do their jobs, law enforcement could clean up the problem readily. Ten patrol vehicles could cordon off an area where the illegal drivers were gathered. When the packs hit the highway, it is fairly easy to block off a section. Even mobile fencing in a tight urban area would allow the police to corral these lawbreakers. (Traditional tools like spike strips, useful for disabling cars, are probably too dangerous to use on motor bikes.) Once the dirt-bike and ATV crowd was immobilized, it would be a simple matter to seize the offending vehicles and cite the offending drivers. A few dragnet operations and the sight of groups of 16-25-year-old men losing their expensive and disruptive toys would send a powerful message and end the mayhem.
What is stopping this relatively easy fix? The truth is that the packs of motor-bike riders are not the real problem but merely a symptom. The underlying disease is that the criminal justice system has been disabled by progressive prosecutors and their political co-conspirators. If there is no consequence for illegal conduct – whether riding dirt bikes on the streets or killing a rival gang member – then criminals will keep engaging in such conduct. The rise in the incidence of illegal dirt-bike crews in recent years has paralleled the rise of homicides across American cities.
Forty years ago, criminologists James Wilson and George Kelling reminded the world that broken windows or graffiti that are not taken care of in a neighborhood can lead to escalating criminal disorder. More recently, Penn criminologist John MacDonald has conducted quantitative studies to show that cleaning up vacant lots and dilapidated buildings can reduce urban crime. The packs of young men riding around on dirt bikes are merely the latest versions of broken windows and blighted lots. If the United States wants to start reducing violent crime, it can start with the easy stuff: fix the broken window, clean up the graffiti, stop the panhandling and open drug use, remediate the vacant lots, crack down on the shoplifting, and confiscate the illegal motor bikes. Then get down to the serious business of stopping homicides. But understand: in the end, these are not separate issues.
Tom Hogan has served as a federal prosecutor, local prosecutor, and elected district attorney. He currently is in private practice.
