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Inside Oakland’s vigilante resistance Local residents are taking on stunt drivers from hell

'It’s a speed exhibition. It’s lawlessness.' Credit: YouTube

'It’s a speed exhibition. It’s lawlessness.' Credit: YouTube


September 13, 2024   5 mins

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.

Another neighbour, Marcos, who declined to give me his last name, is a 65-year-old truck driver who works at night. One early morning, returning home from work, he had to sit in his car for an hour and a half waiting for a sideshow to disperse just to drive the last block to his house.

In the past few years, Oakland’s sideshows have become more diffuse: according to the city, several hundred intersections are regularly used for sideshows. Spiralling skid marks stain streets all over town. And nowadays, you’re as likely to hear the screeching of tires at 10am as you are at midnight. A single car will do a spontaneous intersection takeover in broad daylight, without a pre-warned crowd gathered for the spectacle. Affluent neighbourhoods aren’t safe, either: one of the most popular intersections is on Skyline Boulevard, on the ridge of the Oakland Hills, alongside a regional park used by hikers, joggers and equestrians. Sideshows have also spread to other cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco.

Even though sideshows began in Oakland, they now tend to be organised and attended by a marauding group of participants from all over northern California. “I would say 70% are from out of town,” Armstrong says. “It’s a group that’s causing havoc throughout the East Bay.”

With their drunk and hopped-up crowds, sideshows are often preludes to other crimes. Last month, five people were shot during one in East Oakland. In July, a sideshow mob ransacked a convenient store near the airport, racking up $100,000 in damages. In June, 15 people were shot in a gunfight following a sideshow.

With no faith in the city authorities or the police, tormented residents have taken matters into their own hands. Last month, Salcedo and his neighbours put up impromptu barriers in the worst-hit intersections in Oakland’s San Antonio district to discourage the mayhem. They dragged tires into the road, filled them with rocks and dirt, and painted them in bright colours. They installed speed bumps and Botts’ Dots pavement markers purchased on Amazon. And they did all this without the city’s permission or knowledge.

“With no faith in the city authorities or the police, tormented residents have taken matters into their own hands.”

Users on one Oakland subreddit applauded the intervention. “I’m tempted to do something similar,” wrote one user. “The city has failed us so might as well take matters into your own hands.”

For a while, the San Antonio neighbourhood’s guerrilla installations worked. But a driver speeding in a stolen Lexus hit one of the tires and flipped it over. City workers came in one morning soon after and removed the tires, leaving some of the smaller, less hazardous impediments in place.

After that, residents lost patience with the city. At an outdoor meeting with a council member, a city engineer lectured the neighbours about Oakland’s liability for their handiwork. He told them that the impediments were a fire code violation as they blocked the egress of fire trucks, and that the risks they posed to drivers was “non-negotiable”.

‘STOP dangerous sideshows’ poster in San Antonio. Credit: Leighton Woodhouse.

“Your liability is more important than my kid being hit by a car?” one neighbour asked. The residents complained of cars running up on sidewalks where kids play; one of the worst intersections is between a park and a middle school. A Brazilian man named Odelson Souza said his two-year-old was once nearly run over. From the neighbours’ perspective, the city is more worried about the hypothetical safety risks posed by their DIY obstacle course than the real risks posed by daily sideshows.

The city is currently testing new hardscape solutions such as bollards and traffic circles, but at the tectonic rate of about one intersection a month. The police, meanwhile, are powerless to shut down sideshows when they involve hundreds of people, many of them armed — though Armstrong told me that they have had some success embedding undercover officers in the crowds, taking pictures of cars and licence plates, and impounding the vehicles in the days that follow. Last year, the county made it illegal to attend a sideshow as a spectator, though that law is being challenged in federal court.

Besides being annoying, dangerous and occasionally deadly, sideshows have come to embody Oakland’s surrender to brazen criminality. Not far from where Salcedo and his neighbours put up their road blocks, there is open sex trafficking, day and night. Pimps and prostitutes operate outside schools. Meanwhile, the streets alongside Oakland’s 880 freeway are filled with tarp and tent encampments, and decaying RVs clog miles of sidewalk on either side of the Oakland Coliseum, which the city’s last professional sports team will soon abandon.

The defiant screech of the sideshow is a constant reminder to Oakland residents that when it comes to public safety, they’re on their own. But to the residents of San Antonio, it’s even worse than that: they’ve learned that even when they improvise their own fixes, the city will remove them. “Right now, they protect the criminals,” Salcedo told his neighbours at their meeting. “They need to protect us.”


Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California.

lwoodhouse

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Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
28 days ago

Wait till violent vigilantism becomes an everyday occurrence across the west. Ignoring crime and refusing to protect citizens is a dangerous game.

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
27 days ago
Reply to  Matt Hindman

I suspect that’s what they want. A handy excuse to clamp down on citizens and increase authoritarian government power.

Daoud Fakhri
Daoud Fakhri
27 days ago

Anarcho-tyranny in a nutshell.

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
27 days ago
Reply to  Daoud Fakhri

It’s a brilliant plan with absolutely no potential whatsoever for backfiring horribly!

Arthur G
Arthur G
26 days ago

Tough to do in the US where the population own a few hundred million firearms. The civilian population of Texas own more military grade rifles than the British Army.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
26 days ago
Reply to  Matt Hindman

According to F. Fukuyama, it was vigilantism which caused the rise of mafia groups in southern Italy due to the inability of government to enforce the law. People unable to do it themselves started hiring neighborhood thugs to do it, and it spiralled out of control from there. (Political Order and Decay).

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
27 days ago

It’s almost like govt has given up. It’s incapable of implementing even the most obvious solutions and is really not interested in solutions. Sad state of affairs.

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
27 days ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It’s going to get really spicy when government figures out that people can give up on it!

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
27 days ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Given that we have 30-year-olds who consider commonplace activities like being on time for work and doing laundry are “adulting”, is it really a surprise that Western governments are in such a state?

Vidar Bøe
Vidar Bøe
27 days ago

The people have turned their back on God: “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.  For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”

ALLEN MORRIS-YATES
ALLEN MORRIS-YATES
27 days ago
Reply to  Vidar Bøe

Yes, well that sounds like a perfectly accurate description of the symptoms. We could discuss what exactly is this God they have turned their back on, but they are surely heading in a wrong direction. A reference to the source text would be helpful please 🙂

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
27 days ago

2 Timothy 3:1-7

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
27 days ago

Exactly how are the local residents taking them on? What I see here is thugs taking the p&ss, laughing in the faces of decent law abiding people whom they see as weak and stupid. So sure of themselves because they know no one is going to stop them. Good people who are understandably afraid, for their lives of their families, have too much to lose. Having been enabled to commit their antics, by impotent police, councillors and politicians their challenge is only their ability to be more extreme in their terrorising. More I read, the more it appears that the USA in general must be close to all out anarchy……the U.K. and Europe isn’t far behind either.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
27 days ago
Reply to  Kiddo Cook

Yep. We moved from a large metropolitan area to a quiet rural one last week – one with a population of under 2500, no-nonsense police who will ticket for 5 over the speed limit (35), and horses for neighbors.
The Escape From New York creatures can have at it. Before long, the sane rest of the country will forget all about them and the J.G. Ballard world they’ve created for themselves. They can try to encroach on us when they leave their High-Rise, but we’re armed, and ready for them.

Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
27 days ago

Why do people vote for these lefty mayors, prosecutors and other officials? Why is this cr**p Newsom still Governor? People will get lawlessness, if they don‘t vote for change.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
26 days ago

Because schools are churches now and don’t teach kids how to think critically.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
27 days ago

Plastic baggies of oil on the pavement should make things run more smoothly.

John Huddart
John Huddart
27 days ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

Yeah folks on mobility scooters would appreciate that, not!

Rob N
Rob N
27 days ago

All part of the huge rise in crime in the US (and UK and other ‘invaded’, progressive led countries).
For an explanation as to how the Biden admin can claim a reduction in crime see https://x.com/amuse/status/1833844205036216355
The only explanation that makes sense is a Marxist led desire to destroy society so they can rebuild it.

Jim M
Jim M
27 days ago
Reply to  Rob N

Marxism creates nothing but poverty and mass graves. Why do you think they believe in a utopia. They want to make the world like South Africa.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
27 days ago

I loved the Road Warrior movies back when they were entertainment. Little did I guess that they were telling us what was to come.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
27 days ago

Harris and her VP are direct contributors to this breakdown of civil society.

denz
denz
24 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Old Joe is still the President.

mike otter
mike otter
27 days ago

In UK gaoled murderers, rapists and psycopathic sadists are being released to scare and disrupt civil society plus make room for what in many cases are political prisoners. I dont think its that bad yet in USA, though crazy driving/DUI takes and ruins lives. The left will keep pushing until we push back. No one ever imagined “please Mr Mao/Castro/Mugabe etc, pretty please stop killing people” would have any effect – why would it work with their successors who have at best a 1:4 ratio of public support. (That’s before the buyers’ remorse sets in – CF 1938 Germany) So normal people outnumber them c4:1. I realise civil society implies a peaceful response to attack when possible: How far do you go with (often armed) bad actors before even the most peaceful have to fight back. History suggests are heading toward a tipping point. The next problem will be to control the backlash.. the The red armies rampage through east Europe and the score settling in post occupied France don’t make pleasant reading.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
27 days ago

And they did all this without the city’s permission or knowledge.
One of two things will happen: the law-abiding will either do more of this sort of thing (and it will eventually get ugly), or Oakland will degenerate into full Mad Max. A potential third option – that city authorities start doing their jobs – is more a punch line than a possibility.
When people are pushed into a corner and believe they have nothing to lose, they can become exceedingly dangerous. The truism in human nature that “you always get more of what you allow” has gone beyond any limits of normal tolerance. When the normal remedies such as appealing to one’s public officials fail, the next steps are not things anyone should want.

Graeme Crosby
Graeme Crosby
27 days ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Ordinary folks are easy to arrest, so the authorities will persecute those trying to protect themselves whilst allowing the criminals to blight everyone’s lives as they’re far too difficult to deal with.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
27 days ago

What civilization collapse looks like: civil authorities unwilling or unable to act against lawbreakers, but eager to limit the actions of law-abiding citizens. It’s a blue jurisdiction phenomenon around the world, really.

Peter M
Peter M
27 days ago

In Toronto, where car theft is a growing problem, police told home owners to put the keys to their cars by the door so thieves wouldn’t cause too much damage when breaking in looking for them so that they could steal you car! They retracted the recommendation after awhile but you get the idea that citizens are on their own in ways they never used to be. People are buying retractible bollards for their driveways.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
26 days ago
Reply to  Peter M

But I guess they’re not buying guns.

Andrew
Andrew
27 days ago

This kind of article is essentially useless information, to quote Mick. All it does is trigger emotional reactions, by-passing reason, and the result is the expected, reflexive non-think, herd clichés — it’s the progressives/Marxists, yada yada.

There’s almost no context by which to understand why the cops are so underfunded. This should be provided in an article worth the read, either directly or by links to sources. Preferably thorough investigative journalism. Without knowing context, a severe lack of law enforcement personnel looks like austerity, which is hardly a progressive approach. Were the citizens of Oakland convinced to vote for freezing or lowering municipal taxes? Is it yet another case of big increases in spending that benefit the wealthy, which creates shortfalls, which are paid for by the public in the form of cutting back social benefits? Without knowing broader context, every attempt to fix a social ill like this is plugging yet another crack in the dike, with long-term solutions that get to the root of the problem sidelined.

That said, I fantasize buying a paintball gun. Practice practice practice, then set up in a hidden location with safe egress, and aiming for windshields. Blat!

Graeme Crosby
Graeme Crosby
27 days ago
Reply to  Andrew

Rules are useful when enforced.

Dems don’t like rules.

Defund, yada, yada……

Chris Whybrow
Chris Whybrow
27 days ago

The article says more about who they’re up against than it does about the vigilantes themselves. I thought the title was going to get changed.

Katalin Kish
Katalin Kish
26 days ago

In Melbourne, Australia police officers flash their uniforms participating in bikie acoustic violence, force crime witnesses to fight at court as accused criminals in an admitted silencing attempt, try to entrap crime witnesses & victims for good measure, visibly enjoy displaying their narcissistic sadism.

In Australia crime victims are assumed to be responsible for whatever they are forced to suffer, crime reporting even by public servant witnesses to crimes punishable by 10 years in jail is routinely blocked, treated as if reporting crimes would be an incredibly indecent, a lewd act. Until I gave up trying to report a stalker ex-coworker’s ongoing crimes against me since 2009 – including acoustic violence delivered by dozens of bikers to my home 24x7x365 – I was stared at, treated like I was meant to accept violence against me with obedient resignation & silent dignity: out of sight at all times.

I never even dated the stalker aided by MARCUCCI Victoria Police officers in his crimes against me since 2009 to the extent I lost my ability to earn a salary in 2017 because of the severity of the sabotage of my electronic communication. I am a Monash STEM graduate MBA e-commerce world-champion. I was a migrant success story until ongoing, unpunished MARCUCCI crimes devastated me.

I have owned my home since 2001 in Clare O’Neil’s leafy electorate. Clare O’Neil hasn’t just ignored my pleas about the flaunted criminality of Victoria Police officers, she blocked me on every social media platform via her MP accounts which I tried to use to contact her: while using taxpayer funds for her social media presence as the MP for my electorate. I still have to suffer the indignity of receiving O’Neil’s self-praising news letters several times a year – production, postage & handling paid by my taxes, even though I could not afford heating my home for 3 winters in a row due to the severity of unpunished crimes against me.

There is no point in trying to move, the MARCUCCI will always know via their government jobs where I live, before any of my loved ones would.

Police officers’ criminality is likely the longest non-Aboriginal tradition in Australia. See Raymond T. HOSER’s books* on Victoria Police corruption, or my ‘Perfect Crimes’ LinkedIn article for some of what I have been forced to learn about Australia’s absurd crime reality. Last crime against me in my home involving technology our taxes are paying for at 3:05pm today. I am writing this paragraph at 3:16pm on the 14th of September 2024.


“Victoria Police Corruption”, Raymond T. HOSER, (736 pp.) Kotabi, 1999. ISBN 0-9586769-6-8 – I scanned this book into pdf, when I realised how closely the stalker ex-coworker’s crimes against me match standard Victoria Police crimes. I have been sharing the scanned version of this book via the Adobe website for free with HOSER’s permission. See my “Perfect Crimes” LinkedIn article for the link.

“Victoria Police Corruption 2”, Raymond T. HOSER, (800 pp.) Kotabi, 2000. ISBN 0-9586769-7-6

Matt F
Matt F
25 days ago

Bring back Inspector Harry Callaghan!

Janine Econ
Janine Econ
22 days ago

These jerks are pulling these stunts on the Bay Bridge now and stopping traffic for hours. They come over to San Francisco as well and do so on the Embarcadero and at the relatively new passenger ship piers. Where is law enforcement?