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.