Cleveland Had Them on Camera the Whole Time. It Still Couldn’t Protect the Neighborhood.

Politics / Public Safety — REAL POWER.TV

The city watched 133 illegal vehicles take over the East Side from a helicopter, knew where they were and where they were headed, and let them come back the next day and do it again.

That’s not a failure of information. It’s a failure of will — and it tells you exactly how power decides who gets protected in this city.

On Saturday, August 8th, a resident on Neff Road near East 185th counted 133 dirt bikes, ATVs, and cars swarming the neighborhood. On Sunday, August 9th, the same crews returned and ran the streets a second straight day, east side to west side, terrorizing residents and the businesses trying to serve them. Cleveland City Council Safety Committee Chair Mike Polensek says one of these groups shot into a shelter for babies last month. He’s now demanding that Mayor Justin Bibb, Safety Director Wayne Drummond, and Police Chief Dorothy Todd get aggressive and start holding people accountable. “I’m done with this,” he said.

Here’s the part that should stop you cold. According to the Division of Police’s own August 10th statement, the department had advance warning — intelligence that people were traveling from Baltimore, more than 375 miles, to take over Cleveland’s streets. Officers made seven arrests, towed eight vehicles and four dirt bikes and ATVs, recovered three handguns and a stack of drone and camera equipment. And still it wasn’t enough, because the department had eyes in the sky the entire time and no coordinated plan on the ground to corral the crews and make the arrests the moment demanded. Polensek said it plainly: officers “knew where they were and where they were traveling,” but lacked the plan to act on it.

Sit with that alongside everything else this city has been willing to build. Cleveland has found the budget and the political will for cameras, for surveillance infrastructure, for helicopters and drones that can track a swarm of vehicles across the whole city in real time. The watching apparatus works. What consistently fails to show up is the protecting apparatus — for the neighborhoods on the East Side that carry the chaos up to their own front doors.

That is the oldest arrangement in Black America, dressed in new technology. Our neighborhoods are the most surveilled and the least protected places in the country. The same public-safety machine that can put a camera on a corner where organizers meet cannot produce a coordinated plan to stop 133 vehicles it is actively watching from the air. Being seen and being safe were never the same thing, and Cleveland just proved it two days in a row.

And understand where the accountability actually sits, because this is where narrative gets blurred on purpose. Council did its job. Council passed the ordinances that armed this city with tools — including a law making it unlawful for a gas station to fuel people participating in a takeover. The police knew where the crews were staged. They knew where they were tanking up. The tools existed. The enforcement didn’t. That gap doesn’t belong to the people who wrote the laws. It belongs to the administration and the command staff responsible for using them.

So when someone drives 375 miles to take over your city, Polensek’s answer is the right one: they do it because they can, for the most part, and get away with it. The signal a city sends is a form of power. Right now Cleveland is sending the wrong one — to the crews, and to the residents on Neff Road who counted all 133 of them alone.

The question isn’t whether the police tried this weekend. It’s whether the people who run this city’s safety apparatus will protect a Black neighborhood with the same energy they bring to watching it. Until that changes, the cameras are just witnesses.

Who do you think this city is actually built to protect — and who’s expected to count the cars themselves? Tell us below.

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