Juan Salcedo was fed up with the endless stunt driving outside his front door. Day and night, young men took over the intersection in front of his house and did doughnuts, sometimes for hours on end. At around five in the morning, Salcedo, a bearded, middle-aged homeowner, walked outside and confronted the drivers, asking them to cut it out. One of them pulled a gun on him and said, “This is Oakland. Go back inside.”
Even more than its neighbour San Francisco, Oakland is known for its extraordinarily high levels of crime. The city’s police force is understaffed by hundreds of officers. Only 35 are on patrol in the city of nearly half a million at any given time, and they’re limited by rules that prevent them from, for instance, pursuing drivers fleeing crime scenes. The situation is so extreme that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has deployed state highway patrol officers to do city police work.
But the crime that seems hardest to stop is also the most inane: sideshows. In the Eighties, the earliest sideshows were largely benign: young men would cruise through the neighbourhood in swanky cars in a kind of impromptu parade, like something out of the film American Graffiti. “I used to go to sideshows as an 18-year-old,” former Oakland police chief LeRonne Armstrong tells me. “It was just guys from the community showing off nice, restored cars.”
In time, drivers started performing tricks in the intersections. This was not unusual for California low-rider culture — but since then, these sideshows have evolved into something more threatening. “Now it’s a speed exhibition. It’s lawlessness,” Armstrong says.
Today’s sideshows are typically organised through text chat and WhatsApp groups. But if you’re not in the loop, they appear spontaneous: dozens of cars will suddenly appear at an intersection, often in the middle of the night, surrounded by hundreds of boisterous onlookers. Cars do doughnuts and burnouts with passengers hanging out of the windows, while the crowds film them to post on YouTube and Instagram. People launch fireworks, fire their guns into the air and torch abandoned vehicles. If the cops show up, the crowds just jeer at them.
Sometimes bystanders are hit by drifting cars. Last weekend, a swaggering red Mustang crashed into the crowd, running over a woman. Residents living near the crime scene told me that sideshows have been a problem for years. “It’s every other Friday or Saturday night,” Joel Everett, a 63-year-old church member, tells me. People park on his residential street to join the crowd of spectators, leaving trash, bottles and cans everywhere, and pulling in and out of his driveway to make three-point turns. Everett worries about his car getting stolen or broken into. “You can’t sleep. There’s gunfire,” he says.
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