OGDEN, Utah — Neighbors who live at the north end of Monroe Boulevard have been trying to draw the attention of the mayor, city leaders, and police over a street racing problem they say won’t be going away.
Arlen Tolle said Wednesday he’s seen issues along the road—which is largely a straightaway—for years and recently fellow neighbors have started using their phones and security cameras to document the bad road behavior.
“It’s every night,” Tolle told KSL 5 in an interview. “I’ve almost been hit. My wife, me, and my dogs have almost been hit.”
Simple scolding, he said, hasn’t worked and often brings a harsh response from the street racers.
“I’ve hollered at ’em and screamed at ’em and I’ve been threatened they’d burn my house down, to shoot me and shoot my dog,” Tolle said.
Layne Beddes said he started sending emails and videos to the mayor over the past month, hoping for dialogue and a holistic solution to the problem.
He said he has received two responses from the Ogden Mayor’s office saying the matters were being referred to the police department.
Ogden Police Lt. Cameron Stiver said the department was well aware of the issues at the north end of Monroe.
He said the department was working the issue “on a different level,” has assigned more manpower to the problems, and has also placed cameras in the neighborhood to gather intelligence and information on any street racing vehicles.
Both a remote camera and a patrol vehicle were in Beddes’ neighborhood when a KSL crew visited Wednesday afternoon.
Stiver also reminded that under a new law, street racing was an arrestable offense and punishable with a class A misdemeanor charge. He added that any vehicles involved in street racing could be impounded or even seized if they are found to be unsafe or not street-legal.
“We are definitely out doing the best we can in some of those areas,” Stiver said. “We are doing whatever we can to do identify these drivers and hopefully hold them accountable.”
Beddes said police have been great in trying to address the neighborhood’s problems, but he said more needed to be done.
He said he was hoping for more engagement from city leaders and suggested measures such as speed bumps.
“Somebody’s going to get hit and killed,” Beddes said. “Whether it’s a pedestrian or a kid or somebody in one of the cars—somebody’s going to die.”
When asked for comment late Wednesday afternoon via email, a mayor’s staffer did not immediately furnish a response.
Tolle said though he had witnessed the street racing on Monroe for a long time, he was still hopeful something would change in his neighborhood to make it a safer place for families to roam.
“They used to play basketball up here and ride their bikes and they can’t even do that anymore,” Tolle said.
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