Cleveland Remembrance Page/IG
A screenshot from a video showing the Playhouse Square Drifter incident over Memorial Day Weekend.
No arrests have yet been made after a crew of drivers managed to ruthlessly drift around a circle of fire underneath Playhouse Square’s GE Chandelier for at least a minute on Sunday morning, Cleveland Police said.
In a short press conference over Zoom, Sgt. Freddy Diaz, a CPD spokesperson, said that police need Cleveland’s help providing names for those involved in a string of defiant drifting events, two of which were recorded on video and uploaded to social media this weekend.
A 15-second video posted on the Cleveland Remembrance Project’s Instagram page shows about a dozen cars blasting loud music and blocking the intersection of East 14th and Euclid Avenue.
Though no one was injured, both during the ring-of-fire display in Playhouse Square and after cruisers showed up, many observing Clevelanders lambasted CPD for not preventing or curtailing the ballsy event in the first place.
“Literally out Bibb’s front window and not an officer in sight … strange,” Eric Shebestak said on Twitter/X.
“Where were the police? Why did it take so long for them to get to the scene?,” Matthew Lubbeck wrote. “What a total embarrassment for the city of Cleveland.”
Diaz reiterated that CPD did show up before any injuries or lasting vandalism occurred. (As of Tuesday, skid marks and fire burns were still slightly visible.)
“Obviously this is something of a concern for law enforcement and for the community,” Diaz told media. “These types of acts are dangerous, and we don’t condone [them].”
“And we will enforce the laws that are applicable in those situations.”
Social media is littered with videos of mostly teenagers engaging in joyriding and easy car thefts, especially during the rise of Kia Boyz phenomena, teens that take advantage of a technical flaw in most Kias and Hyandais. Diaz said he couldn’t confirm whether the Playhouse Square Drifters were in fact teenagers.
But irritation from Clevelanders revolves around, it seems, an increasing tension between Mayor Justin Bibb’s promise of an “all-of-government” approach to handling summer crime and repeated reports of dangerous activity around the city. Many see the drifters as a bad harbinger of a typical summer increase in crime.
Bibb’s idea is to concentrate hired officer enforcement in highly-specific areas prone to violent and nonviolent crime.
“We know, based on research, that approximately 4% of geography accounts for nearly half of all crime. We are taking a targeted, data-driven approach to narrow in on neighborhoods across the city that have historically been affected by violence during the summer months,” Bibb wrote in a press release.
“Our comprehensive strategy goes beyond just law enforcement,” he added, “as various departments will be prioritizing the delivery of city services in these hotspots—which will be combined with our violence prevention efforts—with the goal of creating a ripple effect in reducing crime citywide.”
Over the weekend, four men were shot in an incident near East 14th and St. Clair Ave, Channel 19 reported. And in April, News 5 reported, two men were shot after an apparent argument outside the Frozen Daiquiri Bar’s new location near East 7th and Bolivar Road.
And, in the most insane happenstance of ballsy crime, one man opened fire around 3 p.m. on April 30 on the northern edge of East 4th St, WKYC reported. The two men were apparently arguing about sports, when one man smacked the other. One pulled out a gun and fired. A bystander at the Corner Alley was grazed in the hand.
Mark Oprea
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