Sideshows in Sonoma County: Dangerous, illegal, and hard to stop

Residents in several Santa Rosa neighborhoods are fed up with sideshows ― the loud, tire burning, illegal car-spinning demonstrations that have become more frequent during the pandemic ― and they’re speaking out over what they say is a lack of enforcement by police.

Bonnie Hogue is one of a handful of neighbors in west Santa Rosa to complain to authorities, then to the city manager, about what they see as a disappointing response to a dangerous and irritating activity that ruins the evening peace of their neighborhood.

She wants to know what the city is doing to stop sideshows.

“I don’t think it’s asking too much of the city and the police chief to respond to this question, for currently the impression is that SRPD is ceding the streets to unruly and dangerous car gangs,” she wrote to several city officials last week after two nights of sideshows that forced her and other neighbors to shut their windows on the first day Santa Rosa had clean air in a month.

She hasn’t received any answers.

“The police aren’t responding. The city is blowing it off,” she said this week in an interview. “It’s not acceptable.”

Police and CHP officials acknowledge they’ve seen an increase in sideshows in the past two years, and a clear uptick since pandemic restrictions began in March.

Authorities have a variety of laws at their disposal to deal with sideshow participants and are considering additional ways to prevent them or crack down on observers. But mostly police have taken a low-key approach to the shows, breaking them up by dispersing participants and generally not issuing many citations.

“It’s a balancing act for us,” said Santa Rosa Police Capt. John Cregan. “Last week when we had vehicles on Sebastopol Road, we got angry calls asking why we didn’t take a more aggressive stance in clearing them out. On Cinco de Mayo, we did. And we got the opposite reaction: ‘Why do you enforce such meaningless crimes?’”

Sonoma County has launched an innovative program to help mitigate the rogue road activity ― placing large yellow or white ceramic dots in trouble intersections. They’re larger than typical traffic dots and can cause tire or rim damage when hit while skidding, but don’t interfere with normal traffic.

“I think it’s an epidemic,” said Johannes Hoevertsz, Sonoma County’s director of transportation and public works. “They’re doing it on off-ramps, on-ramps, every intersection they can, regardless of the size.

“It’s really, really dangerous. They can easily lose control and hurt themselves or hit a pedestrian.”

Earlier this month, a 21-year-old Sacramento State University student suffered a brain injury when he was hit and run over by a car participating in a sideshow in Natomas, north of Sacramento, that drew an estimated 700 vehicles. San Francisco police are investigating a fatal shooting Sept. 7 at a sideshow in the city.

The problem of sideshows isn’t new, but has escalated in the past two years, police say. Crackdowns in other Bay Area jurisdictions sometimes push car enthusiasts to Sonoma County for their demonstrations, police say.

The events sometimes start out as innocent, informal car shows, but then some participants start showing off by spinning donuts, skidding sideways or burning rubber. Occupants of the cars hang out the windows, or sit on window sills with their upper bodies outside the vehicle. Several hundred cars or more can show up.

In Santa Rosa, sideshows on Cinco de Mayo drew hundreds of cars and watchers in Roseland. Santa Rosa police, Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies and the CHP worked to disperse the shows but didn’t make any arrests or seize any cars. On Sept. 16, Mexican Independence Day, another huge show of about 200 cars eventually prompted police to break it up without additional enforcement.

Smaller shows occur a couple of times a week, police and residents say, in wide intersections and big parking lots like the Santa Rosa Marketplace ― home to Costco and Target on Santa Rosa Avenue ― the Kohl’s lot on Airway Drive and even smaller intersections in residential areas.

In the county, repeated sideshows have sparked complaints at East Shiloh Road at Faught Road north of Larkfield and near Petaluma on Kastania Road, at Thomson Lane and Magnolia Avenue and other rural locations.

County public works crews have installed dozens of the 6-inch yellow and white dots on the centerlines and lane markers at those three intersections.

“Sure enough, it’s slowing people down,” said Hoevertsz, the county’s public works director. “The cars that do it, sometimes they have rims and low-profile tires. It tears up their rims if they skid into them. They’re quick to change their rims and take off.

“This is working,” he said. “This is going to discourage it. Unfortunately, they’re going to move from one place to another. We don’t have people there all the time.”

Likewise, police complain that they don’t have enough officers to attack each sideshow, especially huge ones like at the Santa Rosa Marketplace, where Cregan said there have been gatherings of as many as 500 vehicles multiple times this summer.

On Sebastopol Road last week, in the Dollar Tree parking lot, more than 200 cars were involved, police said, and many times that number of people were watching.

Cregan said police did log a number of angry phone calls from nearby residents who could hear the noise and smell the burning rubber.

“We don’t have the staffing to confront 200 separate vehicles. Meanwhile, we had 329 calls for service that night, calls throughout the city,” he said. “The keyword here is balancing the priorities and responding to the calls for service around the city.”

There are also cultural sensitivities to pay attention to, he said. Law-abiding cruising and low-rider car gatherings, popular in Latino culture, can morph into illegal shows.

“We want to allow people to gather and to spend quality time showing off their cars, but to step in when they break the law,” Cregan said.

He has met with several car club leaders to discuss solutions. The department is working on a social media campaign to help educate car enthusiasts about the dangers ― and the illegality ― of sideshows.

Along with education comes enforcement.

Santa Rosa police officers are being trained on complexities of the law regarding vehicle impoundment, citations for illegal modifications on cars and possibly new legislation making it illegal to observe a sideshow.

Several shootings have occurred at San Francisco sideshows, including one in which a 21-year-old man died and two other people were injured. Oakland, too, has been trying to crack down on the shows.

Last week, a San Francisco city supervisor proposed legislation that would allow officers to impound vehicles found to be associated with sideshows, and also allow officers to arrest anyone found to be involved in organizing the illegal events.

Police have tried barricading prominent intersections, but those are often a temporary fix.

In Santa Rosa, police blocked off downtown during the nightly demonstrations following the May death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. While most protesters were peaceful, some began to turn donuts or perform dangerous maneuvers with their cars, police said at the time.

Cregan said the issue is complicated further when sideshows are held in private parking lots, like the Santa Rosa Marketplace.

“It changes the dynamic of enforcement and shifts liability to the parking lot owners,” he said. “We’ve not seen a lot of engagement from the owners.”

He said his traffic unit has met with Oakland and San Francisco police, who have been dealing with large sideshows for years.

“We’re exploring some specific ordinances those cities have,” he said. San Jose passed an ordinance last year making it a misdemeanor to watch sideshows from the sidelines.

“We’ve been talking to those cities about the pros and cons of those ordinances,” Cregan said. “Ultimately, we have to present those to the City Council.”

Santa Rosa area CHP Commander Aristotle Wolfe applauded the county for its “novel engineering fixes” and has high hopes the raised dots will work.

But he said educating people to reduce sideshow activity is tricky, getting into the murky world of drivers’ intent.

“Most people aren’t really thinking about breaking the law when they check their phone or speed,” he said. “But it’s a different animal with sideshows because it’s intentionally illegal. It’s a whole subculture that embraces the lawlessness of it. It’s a bonding for their group.

“I don’t want to discourage anybody who’s in a car club or passionate about racing to not do it legally on a track,” he said. “It’s the lawlessness that goes with it that’s troublesome.”

The CHP had scheduled countywide training for other law enforcement on how to spot illegal modifications and which laws to use to curb sideshows, but the pandemic put a temporary halt to those sessions.

Police can use laws such as reckless driving or exhibition of speed against sideshow participants, he said, even if the activity isn’t on public streets.

“Reckless driving is always illegal and it’s always unsafe,” Wolfe said.

For such violations, courts have ruled that impounding someone’s car for 30 days is legal. That can get expensive for owners, who have to pay tow fees and impound charges, which can quickly total thousands of dollars.

If a driver is cited for an illegal modification to his car, he has to appear before what’s called a “smog referee,” and prove legal parts have been reinstalled on the car, Wolfe said. That can be costly as well.

“It’s pretty serious to take someone’s car as an execution of authority,” Wolfe said. “But the courts have deemed sideshows dangerous enough that it warranted that authority even independent of an arrest.”

The CHP is also beginning to seek court orders to seize cars that have participated in sideshows. He said officers can seize a car immediately if they witness the illegal racing activity. If not, officers can ask a judge for permission to find the car and impound it.

“Even if it’s not a sideshow event, it is exhibition of speed if people are watching. But at the least, it’s reckless driving. We can impound vehicles for that. Not only are we going to do that, but we’re encouraging others to do it also.”

The CHP recently won its first court order to have a car impounded, Wolfe said.

One young Rohnert Park man may face that penalty soon. Ty Kumre, 18, was arrested in June after police said he started a sideshow in Petaluma and then led police on a high-speed chase across southern Sonoma County.

He was charged with evading police, a felony, and two misdemeanors of engaging or abetting exhibition of speed. He was driving a modified Ford Mustang and traveling at speeds over 100 mph, police said.

Kumre is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 26 for a preliminary hearing in Sonoma County Superior Court.

You can reach Staff Writer Lori A. Carter at 707-521-5470 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @loriacarter.