Arkansas State Police troopers pull off racing sting
Posted on Monday, January 26, 2009
North Little Rock police Sgt. Rick Bibb thought his carefully planned sting on an illegal street race in a blandly anonymous commercial park on the city's east side might end before it started.
It was after midnight Jan. 18. North Little Rock officers and Arkansas State Police troopers waited in darkness. He counted seven North Little Rock patrol cars and five state police cars. All had their lights off.
"When you're a cop," Bibb said late one night last week, driving around where the sting went down, "waiting and being real quiet are not the easiest or most fun things you do."
They could see the arriving racers - mostly in stock cars on this night, often with too-tinted windows - and it seemed like Bibb's plan would work. In addition to the officers and troopers with him peering over at Fiber Optic Drive from behind a boat business to the east off Baucum Pike, Bibb had a couple officers in unmarked cars in a parking lot who could see the racers' cars and their faces from up close.
A year of complaints about the races and police frustrations when officers couldn't quickly shut them down had led them to this moment well before dawn on a Sunday.
"And then we see this car coming over near where we are," he said, "the headlights coming around some of the turns. And one of the troopers, he looks over at me and said if the car made the next turn, it was all over. He was right. We would have been toast."
The car stopped just short of making the turn. The sting was on.
In the two and a half years since Little Rock Central High School senior Emily Lawrence died in a street-race crash on Rebsamen Park Road in Little Rock, police all over Pulaski County say the events that can draw 200 spectators on a decent night have mostly drifted into the realm of afterthought.
Calls are rare, witnesses even more so.
"I don't know that I could tell you just how much of it goes on," Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings said. "I was probably our department's expert on it at the time, and you just don't hear about it as much anymore."
Pulaski County sheriff's office spokesman John Rehrauer remembered a consistent problem with street racers in Woodson.
"Part of the trouble with enforcement is [the racers] have these elaborate notification networks with lookouts and radios and cell phones," he said.
Still, he said, the days of the races being a constant problem seemed past.
"And here in North Little Rock," Lt. Jim Scott said, "we thought we killed it three or four years ago."
Bibb transferred to the midnight shift at North Little Rock's Rose City substation on East Broadway about a year ago from a patrol district in Levy. He remembered hearing the occasional radio call about racing on the city's east side, but never paid it much mind.
"It was out of my area, and it never sounded like an emergency," he said.
After arriving at the Rose City substation, Bibb acquired a different view.
"Those races can and have killed," he said. "That very much makes it my problem."
Calls would come in frequently - not every Friday night and not every Saturday night, but often enough.
"And every single time you go out there - and it's not like it's far from here - either there's nothing or it's a parade of The Fast and the Furious going past you the other way," Bibb said. "They always knew we were coming."
The site was often Fiber Optic Drive, north of Baucum Pike and home to FedEx, a trucking company and a few others in unadorned buildings well appointed for large truck deliveries. Leading up to the buildings: a long, straight stretch of asphalt, wide and well-lit.
For the past year, Bibb wanted more and more to do something about the races.
"The problems Rick deals with aren't usually families or sidewalks or potholes or streetlights," Scott said of Bibb. "Working midnights, it's going to be things like this. The reason Rick does an incredible job for us is he looks for solutions to his problems instead of just dealing with it and reacting to it. If he can put a stop to something, he does it."
The week before the sting, someone called police to say one woman had pulled a shotgun on another woman during a street race on Fiber Optic Drive.
"She didn't point the gun or anything, just displayed it and made her point," Bibb said.
But it got him thinking. Being early January, nobody on his shift was on vacation. He ran into a state police sergeant, Don Johnson, whom he knew from sitting in a sergeants training class together.
"He told me he'd been hearing some of the same stuff, and that just kind of sealed the deal for me," Bibb said.
State police spokesman Bill Sadler said Johnson's captain declined to allow the sergeant to be interviewed for this story.
Often it can take weeks to get approval for a special mission in a law-enforcement agency, with up-the-chain staff reviews and discussions needed to make anything happen. Bibb asked to pull one officer each from other areas of the city that were fully staffed.
"This one was an easy call," Scott said. "Rick had the idea, ran it by me, I ran it by the patrol division captain, and we were good to go in a couple days. The state police came right on board to assist, and they were great."
There was one unavoidable risk. There might not have been races scheduled for that night. Bibb searched the Internet for a few days, looking for a site - on Facebook, someone's blog, a chat group - that would tell him for sure that the racers would be there. No luck.
"Believe me, I thought about that," Bibb said. "We were sitting out there in the cold, and it's 11:45, and I'm thinking maybe nobody's coming."
Then he saw them, Mazda after Honda after Chevy, pulling onto Fiber Optic Drive.
The officers and troopers waited until after a few races, to make sure at least some of their citations carried an offense reflecting the point of being there in the first place: misdemeanor charges of racing on a public roadway, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
"We pulled up, hit the blue lights and, man, if it didn't look like recess out there," Bibb said, driving the same route he did that night. "People just scattered and scurried everywhere trying to get out. Too bad - there was only one way in and out and we had that covered."
According to a report Johnson prepared afterward, the officers and troopers issued 40 citations, including about half a dozen for racing on a public roadway. One man was arrested for fleeing after driving up on a berm trying to off-road his way out.
Other citations included offenses such as window tinting that was too dark, driving without a license or driving on a suspended license. The state police issued seven warnings.
The racers and spectators came from Cabot, Hot Springs, Conway, Little Rock, Benton, Bryant and Alexander, according to copies of some of the tickets. Attempts to reach them were unsuccessful.
"Mostly, I think, we just wanted to make a point that this is not acceptable, and we will hit you right in the pocketbook if you try this around here," Bibb said. "I just hope it works."
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