Sideshow activity in the East Bay is just too damn high.
It’s one thing to have isolated sideshows where a couple of cars will block an intersection late at night for an hour or two but it’s an entire thing altogether when you’ve got hundreds of people and dozens of cars showing up to one location causing mayhem, property damage, and wanton disregard for the law. According to Kron 4 news on their latest report on Oakland’s fight against sideshows they put out earlier today (Feb 5, 2018) Oakland police arrested 189 drivers and towed 34 cars earlier Sunday night at an impromptu sideshow that had attendees causing property damage and general lack of civility towards local residents. Check out a video of the scene below.
In the early hours of Sunday morning before the sun had a chance to rise over the East Bay hills, local police got reports of yet another illegal sideshow going down near the Fremont Highschool area at the corner of High Street and Foothill Boulevard. In the video from social media, you can see several high-powered rear wheel drive cars pulling off donuts in an otherwise quiet part of the city. Mayhem reached a crescendo as a handful of cars decided to “have at it” at the same time pulling off tandem donuts. Several bystanders had their phones whipped out to document the scene for their own social media accounts.
In one of the weirdest and unfortunate side stories of that morning, according to CBS Local, several young men at the sideshow broke into a nearby convenience store and stole chocolates and candies without robbing the staff or injuring anyone.
This comes after several high-profile stories highlighting sideshows in and around the East Bay. Earlier last week CHP caught one sideshow attendee red-handed (or should I say green handed) shining his laser pointer at a helicopter watching a local sideshow go down in East Oakland. A police officer was injured in Richmond after two sideshow attendees hit the cop with their car before running. Both were eventually caught.
With the warmer weather at night and summer just around the corner, police are stepping up their expertise and the number of local police on patrol in a bid to get the word out there that sideshow activity will not be tolerated.
If you want to slide your car, do it legally. Northern California is one of the few places in the entire country with a dedicated drift venue at Sonoma Raceway for most of the year starting in March. If you can’t make it out to Sonoma, tough luck.
If you do decide to swing it, don’t. But if you really decide that you’re going to swing it, do it out in the middle of nowhere and don’t bother anyone with your hooliganism.
