NEW YORK POST
If the looting of retailers, rampant hard drugs, and a homeless population growing more quickly than the regular one were not enough to make the Bay Area city of Oakland unlivable, add the challenge of so-called “sideshows.”
Counter to the carnival-inspired name, sideshows have proven to be a menace to law-abiding citizens.
Despite trying, the Oakland Police Department, which endured budget cuts, has not stopped the high-speed hoedowns.
Sideshows — which began benignly, in the early 1980s, with car aficionados gathering to peacefully show off their beloved rides next to a carnival in the Foothill neighborhood of Oakland — evolved into impromptu, dangerous and menacing meet-ups.
These days, sideshows are street spectacles that involve participants suddenly shutting down four-way intersections and even major bridges, and using the expanses of asphalt to put on displays of cars, often with blacked-out windows, doing extreme donuts.
The driver stomps on the gas pedal, rapidly accelerates to 50 or so miles per hour, lifts his foot from the clutch, and forces the rear of the car to spin out.
“You can have hundreds of people watching,” city resident Cheral Stewart, who has worked in tech marketing, told The Post.
“Then they start skidding their cars, drifting and doing donuts, one driver after the other. Take photos of the license plates and people will pull guns on you.
“Drivers wear bandannas or ski masks or COVID masks. Some of the windshields are illegally tinted. They shoot guns into the sky. Any activity goes. It’s like ‘Fast & Furious’ has come to our neighborhood.”
Pity the brave citizen who tries to curb sideshows. In a story that aired on Fox 2 in San Francisco, a man used a red bucket to whip the rear of a white sedan “spinning donuts around him.”
He lay on the sidewalk, his head inside the red bucket and his pants pulled low enough that his posterior was blurred. Meanwhile, the show went on, with cars screeching and skidding alongside him.
Soon after, a car spun out of control, hit spectators, and slammed into a fire hydrant, blasting it apart and sending water gushing.
The Fox report noted that cops can do very little since they are invariably outnumbered.
A police car can be seen slowly driving through a sideshow intersection before being escorted away from the scene by a posse of sideshow participants on motorcycles and SUVs.
