Chris Skinner shares his story about our local police

Presenter: KEPW-WholeCommunity.News is sharing your stories about the Eugene Police Department. Today we hear praise for our local police force in a high-profile case involving an international burglary ring. Police Chief Chris Skinner:

Chris Skinner (Eugene, police chief): So we affectionately refer to this as our Skyline Seven that were arrested most recently, and investigators were working really really hard to try to identify pieces of information that we could track down to help us focus on whether or not (a) the suspects were still in our community and (b) if they were in our community, where were they?

This particular group, part of the strategy is that before they commit burglaries, they have a jamming device that jams Wi-Fi, which then oftentimes shuts down surveillance video that’s happening in your house. How many people have surveillance video that’s anchored to their Wi-Fi? Most of us do.

In one particular case, we had a piece of video, a very granular piece of video, with a vehicle that we thought was a suspect vehicle. At that particular moment, it was a Wednesday afternoon, I was on a Council meeting in a work session talking about the values of ALPR technology when we got our first hit on the vehicle we were looking for.

And how we leveraged the technology is we didn’t have a (license) plate. We had a really good description of the car. We were able to put the description of the car into the ALPR technology, and the ALPR technology started giving us options for that vehicle. And we were able to identify the suspect vehicle with a California plate after vetting a couple of vehicles that were similar in nature. But we found the perfect match. We found the suspect vehicle with the plate.

Once we had the plate, the ALPR technology was just invaluable. I’m sitting in the Council meeting, we get our first hit on ALPR, and honestly, if I could have you see what happened next: An entire detective division who was watching the Council presentation, to include our Special Investigation Unit, goes running out of the office, hitting their cars. We had almost immediately 15 to 20 police officers scouring the areas looking for the car.

Long story short, we were able to vector in on an area that we thought the vehicle was at. All of our patrol staff was looking, driving up and down streets looking for this vehicle. found the vehicle at a residence, recognized that the residence was an Airbnb.

We quickly pulled back and started our surveillance. Did our surveillance, I’m not going to talk about a specific tactic we used, but we started our surveillance and we were able to: follow that vehicle up through the communities of Corvallis, Albany, Salem; sat down the street while they committed a burglary in Salem; alerted Salem PD to that, so that’s solved for them; followed them back to Eugene.

And what we were trying to find out is with the stolen equipment, were they dropping it somewhere else other than the house they were staying at? So a stash house or a safe house. We were able to write search warrants as a result of all of that information and ultimately serve those search warrants and we’ll be able to make those seven arrests.

But it was from the moment, from noon on Wednesday of that day, for the next 36 hours, the EPD detectives worked every single hour for those 36 hours until we served that search warrant on those individuals and were able to arrest those seven individuals.

And what is so disheartening, as we now know, it’s just one wave of many and unfortunately maybe future waves that we have to try and pay attention to. But in that particular case, the turning point for us was identifying the vehicle and identifying the location of the vehicle.

Presenter: The chief also recognized the heroism of the officers for stepping between a panicky and understaffed Federal Protective Services staff as protesters pounded on the windows of the Federal Building.

Chris Skinner: We sat in this room as that was unfolding. The piece that people won’t ever experience is as we’re watching the footage on the TVs behind me, watching in real time what’s unfolding, but maybe more importantly, hearing the panic in the voices of the federal agents that were in the building, armed federal agents in the building that were sorely understaffed.

My biggest concern was a deadly outcome as a result of people breaching that building and those federal agents feeling like they had to protect the civilians that were in the building with serious or deadly force. So my choice to do that was exactly that, is, to once the windows started to be broken—

Now, we can go back and forth on who broke the windows, there’s been a ton of investigations. But at that moment in time, the intelligence that we had and what we saw happening is those ones that were being broken and there was a significant concern about the breaching of the building.

That’s when I decided to put us in there to make sure that we wouldn’t have what could have been an armed confrontation with those people. …

Being on the line, knowing that you’re there to try and make sure that you avoid a violent confrontation between our public and federal officials and to have stuff thrown at you and be told to resign your position and all of the things that they hear.

What you saw that night was the men and women of that particular team showing great restraint and standing with strong resolve as they took that abuse when they were there for the right reasons.

It’s incomprehensible the types of things that are being said to our officers—assaulted and insulted, that nobody should ever have to hear—and they kept their composure and their bearing. I’ve got so much pride for them, pride in them, and how they were able to do that.

We had one instance where a female officer was being abused so badly that we had to pull her off the line. And that female officer asked to be put back on, because she said, ‘I can take it.’ I can’t even read you the comments in this forum.

But that’s the piece of the story that often doesn’t get told about this police department—the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of conflicts that we’ve tried to manage and crowds we’ve tried to manage successfully, bringing a sense of safety to those people so they can exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech, goes back years and years and years.

And I just wanted to make sure that I had an opportunity to just thank the organization for standing fast and having the composure that they had. I’m not sure—I’m not sure I could do it, honestly.

Presenter: That’s Chief Chris Skinner sharing two recent stories about the Eugene Police Department.

Please share your stories with us. Our email address is news@kepw.org. We want to hear from you, whatever your story—lo bueno, lo malo, y lo feo. You can check out all of KEPW’s News & Views programs at kepw.org/programming. And you can hear ‘Stand Up and Be Heard’ with your favorite Bikers against Bullies Veronica & Buck every Saturday at noon right here on KEPW 97.3, Eugene PeaceWorks Community Radio.