Paul Bass Photo
Jacobson: We’re on it.
After some success at catching out-of-town bikers coming to New Haven to illegally ride dirt bikes and ATVs on city streets, cops are turning up the heat on local, joy-riding lawbreakers.
Sgt. Karl Jacobson, supervisor of the police department’s Intelligence Unit, brought that message to neighbors in the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team.
For years, neighbors have voiced frustration that illegal dirt bikes and ATVs terrorize the community with their noise and reckless riders. They’ve urged the cops to crack down.
“Let me tell you — nobody riding ATVs illegally has any police protection,” Jacobson said to attendees who filled the community room of the Westville Police Substation on Valley Street Wednesday night. “I know that was a concern. They drive me just as crazy as they drive you. And for the last three years this has been not just my job but a passion of mine to do better with this.”
Jacobson isn’t often found addressing a room filled with neighbors. In addition to his duties with the intel unit, he also is in charge of task force cops deeply involved with federal agencies that are mostly known by the three letters of their names like the DEA and the FBI. He’s usually out rounding up drug dealers and trigger happy gang members. (Click here to read about that.)
But at other times Jacobson and city detectives are working with other neighboring cities to monitor social media in hopes of ruining the good time of dirt bike and ATV enthusiasts creating havoc on city streets. (Read about a big Bike Life ride officers foiled this summer here.) He said that given all the hats he wears, he was previously more focused on the large groups of bikers who often turn up on summer weekends.
Jacobson apologized to Westville neighbors for, he said, neglecting the neighborhood-level problems with the bikes. The majority of the riders from this summer’s big bust were from out of town. He said part of the reason for that focus was that the roving groups also tend to attract violent gang members and people riding around with guns.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
“Over the last three years we’ve seized maybe 70 bikes and arrested numerous people,” he said. “Since we kind of have combated that a little bit, what I’m moving toward now is the little houses and the neighborhoods where there are five or six ATVs that routinely go out and terrorize the parks or the neighborhood itself.”
That shift in focus is already happening in the East Shore/Morris Cove District 9 neighborhood. Working with neighbors who provide addresses of suspected houses where ATVs are allegedly stored, and sometimes pictures and video of the rides, Jacobson and his detectives have been watching houses, obtaining their own video evidence, seizing bikes and making arrests.
He said he plans to do the same now in Westville and West Hills, where neighbors have been funneling a steady stream of tips for some time and even putting in appearances at the weekly Compstat data-sharing meeting at 1 Union Ave. to what to them seemed like no avail.
“When things get reported a lot and the pictures and people complain and nothing gets done, that’s how those kinds of rumors get started,” a neighbor said of a concern that bikers had certain legal protections that trumped everyone else’s. “That hurts you guys. People lose faith that you think that anything that we’re complaining about makes any difference to you.”
“It totally does,” Jacobson said. “Three years ago, it didn’t make a difference to me because my major focus is homicides and shootings, but I’ve seen what it’s done to the city. I’ve seen that chaos, and it leads to more chaos.”
Jacobson said he now has 25 to 30 detectives working on the neighborhood ATV problem. He said the cases have yielded information that have helped get not only illegal bikes off the streets but guns too. He said in addition to replicating the District 9 effort in Westville, he’ll try, with riders he can’t catch outright, a tactic similar to the one used in the anti-gang violence initiative, Project Longevity—confronting wrongdoers with evidence.
“The pictures I got and some of the stuff I got from you guys is going to be great,” he said. “We’re going to target this certain area, this certain house, and if we can’t catch them actually riding and video tape them and take their bikes I’ll go tell them, ‘Look, I have pictures of you. I don’t know who was riding the bike, but when I figure it out, they’re going to be arrested. You need to stop this now.’ I did that in District 9, and it worked very well.That’s what I’m willing to do with you guys too. I’m willing to do it with anybody in the city.”
He urged people to keep calling the tip line at 203 – 946-6298 to share information anonymously, and tell the police where the bikes are being stored. He also passed out a stack of business cards with his contact information so they could contact him personally.
“You will see me more and your problem will be fixed soon,” Jacobson promised neighbors.
Winter will take care of the ATV/dirt bike problem before the Police crack down. With a mantra like "We can't chase them" when they go rogue on our city streets and you try to report the activity, I believe the problem will reappear with the warm weather next Spring. Police are more interested in setting up in-city speed traps to catch hard working people on their way to work than in catching the ATV/Dirt bikers who flaunt the law with impunity.