Too fast, too furious: Dangerous street takeovers stymie police, anger neighbors
cronkitenews.azpbs.org
cronkitenews.azpbs.org
If you change streets to not feel like highways then a lot of this would be impossible to do in the first place. However that would require a bigger reckoning with car culture in the US that it seems we’re not ready to have yet.
I have little insight into LA because South Pasadena isn’t known for street races but here in San Diego, the intersection between my house and the I15 (in an immigrant/family oriented suburb at the outskirts of the city) regularly gets taken over by these assholes on Friday nights. They not only do donuts in a four lane intersection but use it as a launch point for late night freeway races which regularly break triple digit mph [1].
The cops are fucking useless [2]. There’s at least three squad cars every time and all they do is a half assed attempt at crowd control.
At this point I’m hoping my alibaba bulk order of caltrops doesn’t get held up by customs.
[1] a few years ago “in my youth” I pushed my Toyota Corolla to the max racing one of these fellows at midnight going west on the 52 right before the warped asphalt (which has sadly been fixed). If I managed to reach the limits of my speedometer you can bet the guys with turbos are even worse.
[2] a few months ago I was driving down the freeway a few cars behind a cop right as they received a call. For the next five minutes I watched several dozen cars completely ignore the flashing lights, forcing the cop car to weave in and out of traffic like a street racer.
Drivers became more brazen during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, which cleared normally clogged streets and freeways of traffic. Suddenly, many streets were empty and drivers believed they had a newfound freedom to speed, either for takeovers or street racing.
Actually this is a nation wide phenomenon and not just in LA. Road deaths/accidents and road rage incidents are increasing since 2020. I believe The article mentions the takeovers in Arizona also.
I personally think that quote is exactly correct. The empty streets in 2020 caused people to start going faster and taking advantage of the roads and they haven't changed their mindset.
Although in fairness to the police, pulling over a person for a traffic ticket can lead to a gun fight so it's possible police have decided it has a high risk and low reward as far as their time goes.
Before the late 1800s, cityfolk did not have to go get entertained at night or do other business -and they lived and they prospered for thousands of years. Nor do people in small villages have to.
Lockdowns of any kind are not designed for humans.
From wikipedia:
> As of 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department had 10,008 officers sworn in. Of these, 81% (8,158) were male and 19% (1,850) female. The racial/ethnic breakdown:
48.8% or 4,882 was Hispanic/Latino (of any race)
30.9% or 3,090 was non-Hispanic White
9.62% or 962 was African American
7.66% or 766 was Asian
2.46% or 246 was Filipino American
remaining were Indian and Other Ethnicities.
true class is how someone conducts themselves, not their color, neighborhood, job, or income.
is it nice to stage street takeovers or is it dangerous and thugish? what did the "cops" do that was questionable, except perhaps show too much restraint?
And street races are unquestionably dangerous.
For my part, I blame the shitheads not getting their asses thrown in jail with vigorous immediacy. Let the cops barricade the roads and load up the wagons.
The /r/fuckcars subreddit, for example, would absolutely turn this thread into an anti-car talking point.
Not everyone agrees with you that cars and roads are something we should discourage.
i think the anti-stroads people are right but naive: stroads are bad, but how did we get them? and in light of your answer to that, how can we expect them to be fixed? undoing stroads will be a huge expense that will only benefit the overwhelming mass of people. it'll never happen.
The term came from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
No, it is used by folks who like proper design:
> Streets: The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success. Successful streets are environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish.
> Roads: In contrast, the function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad — a road on rails — where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.
> Stroads: Stroads are a mash-up of these two types of paths. We like to call them "the futon of transportation" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad
People who use the word "stroads" want society to stop building stroads and go (back to) building streets and roads. See the ten-minute mark of the video you posted on how The Netherlands does it: stroomweg (highway), gebiedsontsluitingsweg (road), erftoegangsweg (street).
See also his video "The Best Country in the World for Drivers":
> Police say they don’t have enough manpower to stop such street takeovers, which have been popularized by the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise. Residents are fed up.
you'd have to be a baby to take that seriously. cops are just lobbying for more money, "manpower." how old is "fast & furious?" 20 years? more?
I'm surprised police wouldn't use something like a Stringer/blast ball to disperse large crowds that are beyond control, a riot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_ball
What America needs is a competent police force that's held accountable for what it's doing (or not doing).
Comment to skorpeon87 [who is shadowbanned] who said:
If that were true, then we would not see people protesting against misogyny or clamoring for more representation in the various media and producers would tell them to take a hike that it was disproven in the 90s.
Some politicians tried this back in the 90s and were widely derided for it. The matter hasn't really been addressed since; the public has seemingly decided that only fools could believe people are influenced by movies, music, and video games.
Blaming this on stroads is a dangerous politicized oversimplification.
This idea is so preposterous it could be made into the story line for a Seinfeld episode. The wide roads made them do it, Jerry!
https://www.dragzine.com/news/californias-auto-club-dragway-...
"Auto enthusiasts" these days aren't into racing as much any more as just clowning around for the 'gram.
You'd think the cops would shut this sort of stuff down and have a field day with CARB violations.
* 2020 - https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2021/08/street-racing-s...
* 2021 - https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/04/13/street-racers-shut-dow...
* 2018 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygvZCYdPsNk
* 2022 (burnside bridge) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M3v9AngxoU
given that they blocked off the bridge, it was surprising that the police made the decision to just let it go until they got tired and left. there's one way on and one way off a bridge, and one of those ways is blocked with traffic.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/This-S-F-intersection...
In many states the speed limits are being lowered well below reasonable levels and speed cameras are deployed to opportunistically capitalize on citizens, rather than deploying officers on streets to monitor for other offenses that go unchecked... The worst part still being that we're paying outrageously high income and other taxes. Eventually people will start to ask what the purpose of high taxes are for, and why becoming a police officer is more and more of a desk job than being on streets.
Are you sure LAPD is >50% of taxes paid by LA residents? Or is it just >50% of the budget of some taxing body that is essentially just "police, fire, and sewers"?
It would be pretty shocking if LAPD was actually 50% of all Los Angeles spending. It seems pretty unlikely. Compare "Los Angeles public schools budget" to "LAPD budget" in search results.
My understanding is that if you include non-discretionary spending (pensions etc) that number goes up significantly.
There is something deeply weird about finding the one taxing body in a municipality that is responsible for funding the police and then freaking out at what a big chunk of that taxing body's budget the police are. It's like complaining that parks are almost 100% of the parks department budget.
It's entirely possible that LA spends way too much on LAPD. You can demonstrate that by absolute dollars, by dollars spent per capita, or by a percentage of all tax dollars spent on policing. You probably† can't reasonably do it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of a single taxing body.
† (There might be a city where you can do that; I don't think Los Angeles is one of them).
I'd be surprised if schools weren't the most expensive thing in Los Angeles. They are everywhere else I've looked.
Again: none of this is to say that LAPD can't be overfunded. It absolutely can be. You might even be able to demonstrate it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of the city general fund... over time. But you can't do a single point measurement of LAPD's allocation from the general fund and use it as a comparative metric. That's incoherent.
I'm stuck on this because it comes up over and over again in police reform discussions, and reformers/defunders/abolitionists (I'd call myself the first of those, I guess) keep making cringeworthy innumerate arguments. I'm just across the street from Chicago in a village with just 50,000 people, and even here people make the same mistake, trying to look at the village budget in isolation --- it sounds right! Just like "the Los Angeles city budget" sounds like the thing you want to look at! But it's just not.
If you want to boil the current funding in a city down to one number, though, I don't think there's an obviously better one. You can add the school district and utility district to the denominator, the school district police to the numerator, the county sheriffs to both, etc, but you'll have to draw a line somewhere and there's likely to be some arbitrariness. Where do you put the DA's office? How do you think about tax funds which are funneled up to the state and feds but then back down in more or less localized ways (including e.g. grants to police or other city programs)? How do you think about payments on one-off referendum-authorized bonds, or the Port of Los Angeles budget? Maybe you could show me that all of these questions have either clearly right answers or don't affect the numbers enough to matter, but extrapolating from what I remember from spending some time digging into the Oakland budget a few years ago, I'm skeptical.
the Los angeles Police is 1.9b of a 4.9b departmental operational city budget, but there are 600m appropriations and 6.2b non departmental that are in other areas, that aren't terribly clear. So if you have 1.9b of a 11.7b budget, that about 16%.
It looks like property tax accounts for the largest chunk of revenues--20%--but keep in mind that property tax usually fund school districts and county covernment as well (here in NM something like 90% of county budget is property tax.)
So yes, at any place you happen to live your taxes and other governmental fees can easily go to a number of different entities, so while it may be true that LAPD accounts for 16% of the LA budget, it amounts to a much smaller percentage of the taxes you pay.
(Its also possible that the LAPD budget receives funding from other sources and is not accounted in the 1.9b above.)
In fact NYC rents them out to other countries
You have a citation for this? A quick google reveals LA’s city budget to be 11.8bn while LAPD budget is around 2bn
"Drivers fueled by the need for speed show off by skidding around blocked-off intersections, filling the air with clouds of burning rubber in what’s known as a street takeover.
Crowds numbering in the hundreds gather for the late-night displays-"
Classic overfunded police department bullshit
It's _way_ easier to find events of some sort now. They're more organized, safer, and the cars are faster.
I was fairly well connected back "in the day" and it was a monthly thing at best, with the occasionally drags on someone's street on the weekend. Now I know a handful of people, yet I can find an organized street event twice a week.
I've been told it's even more common on the west coast.
A lot of injuries from people standing too close to spinning cars, and when the cops show up everyone races off, often causing accidents with complete innocents.
California has some new laws against the practice, so I guess we'll see where that goes.
https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2022/09/19/governor-signs-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
The draggers are what I refer to as a "self-correcting problem." Generally the roads have potholes and obstacles (these aren't offical dragging areas after all) so fairly quickly somebody will screw up, vaporize their car and kill some girl. At that point, there will be a big bruhaha, lots of wailing mothers and the cops will shut them down for a while.
The biggest problem for locals is that this will cause several hundred pedestrians and cars to suddenly appear in the dark where they're not supposed to be. It's really easy to get in an accident with them and sometimes they shut down your only path home.
Or from 1935, High School Girl: "Heedless youth speeding through life with the throttle wide open".
Destroying property, keeping thousands of people up at night, getting people killed. You can't just throw "fun" on it and say it's okay.
that could improve the life of everyone around you
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Instead of thrilling mass gatherings that push the limits of our car infrastructure and actually do something new and innovative with it (for once), cities will be hollowed out, denuded of their culture, so that sleepy suburbanites can move in and lodge noise complaints. Urban revival will only mean basic bitch breweries and putt putt, instead of mass gatherings of poor workers, with rowdy music and sizzling fajitas.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/those-newly-install...
Cars and roads don’t just kill and maim us. Their psychic operation on us makes it impossible for us to dream.
You could meet in a Walmart parking lot. You could meet in a field. You could meet at a race track.
I'm left wondering if this is a real problem, or just a bunch of HOA types getting all bothered that people who don't look like them are behaving in an unseemly manner.
If you're going to call something "dangerous" in your headline then I would like to see at least one statistic, please.
Noise pollution is a measurable harm, and some of those measurements are massive.