CPD Left A Truck Full Of Nike Shoes Open In A Poor, High Crime Neighborhood To "Bait" Locals Into Trying To Steal
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Community members confronted a circle of police in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood over a "bait truck" allegedly filled with Nike shoes and left open by police aiming to lure potential thieves and make arrests.
"Y'all dirty, man," a man tells officers in an online video of the incident published Thursday. "Y'all see kids playing ball and you pull a f----- Nike truck into the ghetto."
Charles McKenzie, an anti-crime activist who put the video on Facebook, told Vox that the truck appeared next to a basketball court frequented by young people in the largely black neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago.
And while both local and federal agencies conduct such "bait" operations, the site reported, neither Chicago police nor the FBI offered comment on the truck.
Authorities use everything from fake drugs and modified cars to GPS-affixed packages and bikes to weed out thieves nationwide. Theft of in-transit property, known as cargo theft, caused nearly $27 million in losses in 2016, according to FBI data.
But some community members perceived an alleged bait truck, left in an impoverished neighborhood near a basketball court, as an obvious attempt to target black youth as racially lopsided arrests unfold nationwide.
"The police parked a truck with boxes of Nike shoes in front of kids, lifted up," McKenzie, the activist, said on Facebook, "and when people hop in the truck, the police hopping out on them."
McKenzie founded God's Gorrilas , a group promoting job assistance and alternatives to violence in Chicago. His video, which has 630,000 views on Facebook, later picked up another 290,000 views on WorldStar .
In another video , YouTuber Martin G. Johnson allegedly depicts the bait truck traveling between locations with "plainsclothes, FBI-looking type guys." Once parked, he films community members telling authorities to remove the vehicle from their neighborhood.
"Kids shouldn't be breaking back into trucks," a police officer responds.
After the confrontation, however, the white truck is driven away.
"That's what advocacy looks like," one man says. "Good job, people."
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I have a feeling that it's going to come out that police often use such a ruse to try and catch thieves. Like one of the cops in this story says, if you don't want to get arrested, don't take any of the shoes.
I do think though that such advice doesnt take into account a group mentality. The "thieves" could talk each other into taking shoes even if individually they may not have wanted to.
IMO: This is just lazy police tactics, this crap of setting up crimes of opportunity should be outlawed. If there isn't enough crime to catch the criminals, stop encouraging it. We support enough people in jails without encouraging theft.
lazy !
no different than an open road with a low speed limit and a radar cop behind a bush
There was a wide street going through an industrial area close to where I used to live. One side was warehouses and the other side was a huge graveyard. The street was totally dead at night, no one lived there, and it was almost impossible to not speed on it. There was virtually no possibility of hitting anyone and there were never, I mean never any accidents there. The cops would sit inside the graveyard gates every evening and hand out speeding tickets. It was a pure money grab, public safety had zero to do with it.
Awesome, I've used the same technique for some vigilante justice years ago.
Across the street from the bar I used to go to was a restaurant that had a huge sandwich board outside. There was a young motorcycle cop who would hide behind it to catch people doing a CA rolling stop. We actually had a weekly pool as to how many times we heard his siren daily prior to stopping the guilty. I won 20 bucks one time. My guess was 12.