Street takeovers, otherwise known as “sideshows,” are a cultural phenomenon that exploded in popularity during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’ve been anywhere near car culture in the past six or so years, you’ve probably seen videos of street takeovers, where a handful of cars commandeer a public intersection or roadway to do donuts while crowds of onlookers watch and film with their phones.
These actions are obviously illegal and very dangerous, and often get out of hand quickly. There are countless videos online from these events where cars lose control and hit each other, strike public or private property, or barrel into crowds, which are sometimes standing just inches from the bumpers of drifting cars. Some takeovers get so out of hand that the crowds wind up just burning cars to the ground.
Despite some states implementing new laws and forming task forces specifically to combat sideshows, these events remain prevalent across the country, representing the absolute worst part of car culture. [Ed note: Is it even “car culture”? Yes, it’s a culture that includes cars, but do these clowns even like anything in car culture that isn’t this nonsense? – Pete] Going by the actions of this latest street takeover in Maryland, it seems the crowds aren’t even afraid of the police anymore.
Back in 2020, when I first started getting takeover-related content on my social media feeds, it felt like people actually gave a shit when the police appeared to break up the crowd. Once the flashing lights illuminated in the distance, people made a break for it, and the cars participating immediately stopped and found the nearest open roadway to escape.
This became doubly true once task forces in places like California began to stage coordinated mass arrests of drivers and the crowds surrounding intersections. I’ll be the first to admit it was incredibly satisfying to see the people encouraging this type of driving backed into a corner and forced to face the consequences of their actions.
Sideshows make car culture look bad! If you love cars and the act of driving, you should be against this kind of stuff, even if it is fun to see V8-powered muscle cars melt some rubber on a quiet street in the middle of the night. There are plenty of places where you can legally do this type of performative driving, so you have options that don’t involve the rest of the car world hating your guts.
They’re Getting Even More Brazen
Despite all the heightened awareness from law enforcement, sideshows remain a scourge that car culture in America can’t seem to get rid of. This past weekend, a takeover in Montgomery County, Maryland ended with two cop cars getting vandalized by crowds.
The incident began early Sunday morning, when police started tracking cars as they began swinging their tail ends through an intersection. Instead of fleeing when they saw the blue and red lights, onlookers went on the offensive. From the Montgomery County police department:
The vehicles continued along East West Highway and gathered at the intersection of East West Highway and Connecticut Avenue. Drivers blocked traffic and performed donuts in the roadway.
Several people got out of their cars and stood in the intersection, preventing officers from entering while the activity continued.
During the incident, two marked Montgomery County Police cruisers were damaged. In one case, an officer was inside his vehicle when the rear window was broken and the windshield was smashed. No officers were injured.
Dashcam video from inside one of the cruisers, published to YouTube, shows members of the crowd attempting to block the vehicle, while also setting off smoke-producing devices. As the cop tries to maneuver their vehicle through the situation, you can hear glass shattering at 40 seconds in, presumably from when that rear window was smashed in. At 2 minutes, 32 seconds, you can see the windshield get struck.
While this is all happening, you can see a Dodge Challenger continuing to perform donuts and burnouts in front of the police car. Later in the video, the crowd continues to block the cop as other cars in the vicinity flee.
This video is dumb for a lot of reasons, but mainly because if you’re doing something as illegal as participating in a street takeover, you should at least have the wherewithal to flee when the cops show up. Instead, these people are crazy enough not only to stay at the scene but to break the law further by impeding the cops and assaulting their vehicles. Some of them don’t even have masks covering their face, meaning they’re going to be easy to identify.
Cops say they’re currently asking the public for help to track down the identities of everyone involved, and offering rewards ranging from $250 to $10,000 for tips leading to arrests. Personally, I’d be very happy if everyone involved went to jail. It’s this type of stuff that gives gearheads a bad rap.
Top graphic images: Montgomery County Police Department
Re “there are places to do this legally”: Where? I don’t think the duncebags who are doing it in shopping center lots and ruining my time outdoors from a mile away are doing it legally.
Lots of legal places. Here in Florida, Freedom Factory has burnout rivals and now Summernats. Orlando Speed World has drifting. I think Leadfoot city has burnouts and drifting as well.
I feel like we’re preaching to the choir around here, if I had to guess.
The local PD should work with the local community and have watch parties at these take overs. Have a bunch of suburban moms and dads come out, cheer. Grandma and Grandpa too. Make these things so damn uncool that the kids move on from it. Make sure the moms post on social media and infuriate the groups and ask when the next take over is.
That’s my unrealistic, shitty idea to end these things cause nothing else is working.
It could work.
They could have them from 6-7 o’clock? Get it 6-7 !!!!
Yes, I’m old, and tired of shit with no meaning being “a thing” just because someone said it is a thing.
I felt the same about pet rocks back in my day. Now, pull up a chair and let me tell you some more things…
My favourite is constant use of abbreviations no one recognizes, or worse, well known ones used for something unrelated.
100% agreed. These aren’t gearheads, they’re clout chasing attention seeking idiots using cars as their tools.
It could be easy to call me hypocritical, as back in my younger days I was part of a street racing crowd. But the group I hung out with was all about the cars and made great efforts to not be in any populated areas, and absolutely did leave if/when the police showed. For that reason I resent it when street takeovers and street racing are lumped together, but I understand that distinction doesn’t matter to the police and general public.
You grow up in socal? I could hear the Sun Valley street races from my bed room window, that’s how i knew it was time to go.
But yea the street races were in industrial areas, and people genuinely did not want to be caught.
Yeah but San Diego. And yep, spent a lot of time in industrial park parking lots in the wee hours.
Don’t know about Sun Valley. But if you made a right on Foothill from the top of Balboa, and went to were interstate five passes overhead. That was the starting line. It was the mid 1980s.
That’s the Sylmar spot, meet up was at the Denny’s. We’d rotate Sun Valley – Sylmar – North Hollywood, go from one to the next when the cops show up.
Sorry, not foothill. That was N. Sepulveda Rd. that went absolutely straight for like 3/4 of a mile. I had to look at a map. I haven’t lived in that area for like 30 years.
By the time I went out there, Sepulveda wasnt used anymore. Most likely because there weren’t enough side roads to get out once the cops came. Maybe Sepulveda wasn’t as developed in the 80s and that’s where everyone went to race after cruising Van Nuys Blvd.
Yep. there was nothing to the right or to the left.
Same here. We raced on a divided road over marshes with no side streets or driveways for people to come out of and we checked to make sure nobody was fishing or something along the side. We lined up and waited for the road to be clear and ran. Two blockers ran in the back (one usually being me, as I had an ’84 Subaru and wasn’t convincingly racing anything). To reduce morons showing off, only participants who also ran were allowed as passengers. The cars then were also a lot slower and less powerful. It ended when an idiot in a new Corvette somehow tore off the side of his car and the state passed an anti-racing law. We didn’t go somewhere else because there was no comparable place, so we just stopped. Well, my friends and I. I can’t speak for the other people who’d be there, but most everyone was cool (except for a guy with a Grand National, but he wasn’t dangerous, just a dick), so I imagine that was the end.
I remember shutting down local highways for racing. People met up and paired-off. Then proceeded to the start with blockers in the rear.
I learned that the dashed white lines on the highway become one solid line around 140mph when I was riding shotgun in a turbo trans am on Rt 128.
Then when I talked to the older guys, they were doing the same things on different roads in the 70s / early 80s. One state trooper even told me about the time someone showed up with an actual dragster. Rolled it off the trailer, blasted a run to everyone’s pleasure and then had plenty of time to load it back on the trailer without any police interaction. That same road could barely support normal vehicle traffic by the time I was driving.
My father told me they used to race on an unfinished (at that time) part of I95 or maybe it was 128, I forget. Yeah, 128 today is largely an assortment of various traffic jams.
We raced on the Marsh Rd between Lynn and Revere. That got shut down in the mid-90s. After the idiot in the Corvette crashed (and, per the grapevine, got hammered with that new anti-racing law), the cops started paying attention and they’d show up where we’d gather at the Dunkins off the rotary and threaten people with loitering charges and whatever else and there was just an increased presence in general.
Lynn Marsh Road was the place with the dragster. That road is barely suitable for SUV traffic at low speeds these days.
Whoa, yeah, no dragsters when I was around. Closest was this guy who showed up in a late ’70s Malibu with a done up 500 or something in it that ran low 10s on drag tires at NE Dragway. He was apparently the brother of one of the regulars who got smoked by the guy with the modified GN and he showed up to put that guy in his place, which he did. Unfortunately, I only heard the story about 30 times from 5 different people as I had to work that night, so I wasn’t actually there. Nobody liked the guy with the GN. I think he used to run 12s. My friend’s ’68 Chevelle SS was probably around the next fastest in the low 13s. That’s about warm hatchback numbers now. It’s crazy to think how fast cars have gotten since then.
I was more into stereos at the time, but I remember friends spending all of their time and more than their available funds just to break into the 12s.
It is absolutely silly how easy and cheap it is to run those ETs today.
Some street racing in Memphis has involved trailered race cars.
One group being particularly targeted early 60s blocked a road forcing police to abandon their marked car.
The car vanished and has never been found, despite every possible effort made to locate it.
Where are the accusations of ‘domestic terrorism’? Oh yeah, because V8.
Where was Biden during all of this?? Suspicious!
They’re using violence to further a religious or political ideology?
The religion is “Family.”
The philosophy is “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” LOL
anarchy is a political ideology
Ummm…..Brotherhood, something something. Badassidors. Yeah, that’s the ticket
It is car culture, in the sense that it’s the Venn diagram intersection of car culture and criminal activity. “Swimming” falls into the same area. It’s all car culture even if it’s ugly.
Swimming?
Maybe he’s talking about Rolls Royces into pools? No?
Yeah, I got nothing.
People primarily in NY/NJ cutting through traffic going double the speed limit. Swimming is a term for it.
Jihadis use technicals.
Car culture?
There are asymmetric forces in Afghanistan with Canadian flag tattoos because it’s a point of pride to own a legit Ranger produced in Canada, though they likely have never heard of Canada.
The tattoo?
Unquestionably car culture!
What the hell did I just read
It’s all true!
Entire vehicles that are particularly desirable have been counterfeited in some parts of the world.
Ford and Toyota pickups are considered especially desirable.
Motorcycles are often used in lieu of horses as well.
I like watching cars smoke their tires and do burnouts and drifts all day… But a street takeover is just straight up anarchy. Arrest ’em all and seize (not impound) all involved vehicles.
People have already gotten injured and killed by these events. I can’t condone this at all.
At least the gearheads in my city play it safe and only take over parking lots of long-abandoned big box stores. For the few takeovers that were done on the street, the local PD shut that shit down quickly – as they should have.
The sad part is so many of the vehicles are actually stolen then taken to these takeovers, so often action taken against the vehicle itself just hurts an already damaged party. However, with confirmation the car was in the hands of its owner and the owner is the idiot in question, I support seizure.
Eh, if my car were stolen for one of these, I’d rather the police total it than get it back with no tire tread, a toasted transmission, and vape juice stains on every seat.
…not to mention meth hidden in most of the expected places, just out of sight enough that you wouldn’t know about it, but a cop pulling you over would.
Those cop cars should be loaded with cameras and over-armed cops, including a couple sitting backwards in the back seat with machine guns and baz00kas and shit and fuckin SHOOT the degenerates when they attack and vandalize the cop cars LOL yeah have some bombs in the trunk too that will explode on the piece of shit takeover tards
They are busy right now with the other kind of illegals. Like housekeepers and shop owners. And parents.
Don’t forget the clergy
Indeed. Don’t forget elected officials as well
Somebody just needs to convince Stephen Miller that illegals are behind these takeovers.
Take your smiley! Awesome
brilliant!!!
I would say yes, this is absolutely car culture. You don’t get to edit out the bits you decide are icky.
Exactly! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Thus the argument on fake Republicans
This seems akin to qualifying similar-acting e-bike gangs as cycling enthusiasts. This may give car people a bad name, but I think the cars are incidental—they’re merely the most accessible and obnoxious vessels for a certain type of insecure moron and fans who think this stuff makes them badass on social media.
Blacked out bicycles are common here for lookouts to warn other criminals, or commit crimes themselves.
Not quite the same as the long distance clubs wearing fluorescent spandex riding Biancis.
I’m not surprised, though I was thinking of the groups of kids pulling stunts in the streets and in traffic.
I understand.
The flat black bikes stripped of reflectors ridden by people in dark clothing are a well known thing in cities now.
Not unrelated to the bike and three wheeler mobs that ride together.
I don’t think so because as Cerberus said the car isn’t really the point, it’s the activity. These started or were simultaneous with the ATV/Dirt bike street nonsense.
Cars just make the most noise and smoke, they would use fork lifts or shopping carts if they could get similar results.
Smoke and noise are a huge part of what modern car culture is though. A sideshow is just an unsanctioned/illegal burnout competition. With more stolen cars.
I’ve always thought my car should be quieter than the one I just beat.
There are production cars now much louder than my race car.
I watched a guy with a charger trying to do donuts in an abandoned target parking lot.
I give him credit for trying to do it gradually and safely, but it was sort of sad.
I wonder if he knows how to drive it at all?
I never understood the point of donuts.
Still baffles me.
I disagree, yes tire smoke a noise has been part of car culture forever, exhaust cut outs date back to what, the 50s? At the center though was the cars, either building or modifying them to make that noise and smoke. In fact one of the tag lines of this was “build not bought”. So the mere fact you ended your statement with “stolen cars” means none of the pride of ownership, or pride in workmanship exists here. Calling this car culture is akin to saying “I’m into modifying cars” but you really just visit the sticker section of Autozone.
This is a subset of criminal behavior: hooliganism, or vandalism, with cars. Not a subset of car culture: criminal behavior.
There’s a line in Grease about how the parts on the car they built are hot… Theft is also a huge part of car culture. A shitty one, but a part nonetheless. Another way to look at it: Car culture in general is a subset of criminal behavior. Huge chunks of it are explicitly illegal, and yet we do it anyway. The last car’s and coffee I went to was pretty relaxed, but there were a few flybys and smokey exits. There were also a few cops stationed to nab ’em and crowd cheered (loudly) every time they did. Almost everyone there got that they needed to be good neighbors if they wanted to be invited back. Almost. Our overwhelming disapproval doesn’t make a shit bit of difference to the bbq Becky who lives the next block over. All she hears is a bunch of hooligans doing asshattery in cars. She doesn’t approve, and she’s going to let her representative know about it.
I blame their Parents and their lack of parenting.
We cruised back in my youth just to meet people and look at cool cars. We didn’t takeover streets or obstruct traffic. Heck the cops cruised with us every Friday night and we all stayed cool.
I guess the people who are selfish and destructive enough to engage with street takeovers in the first place would also be selfish and destructive enough to start openly brawling with law enforcement.
Idiots
This nonsense needs to result in crushed cars and licenses nuked from orbit. If the driver happens to be IN the car when it is crushed, well that would just be too damned bad.
I may have driven like an asshat as a kid, but I tried my best to do it as unobtrusively as possible at least. This is just being completely and utterly obnoxious.
The cars are usually stolen.
Hence why leave the drivers in them. Not like I would want my car back after it was stolen and abused. That’s why I pay for insurance.
People do stuff like this for one of two reasons:either they don’t think they’ll get caught or punished, or they don’t care if they get caught or punished.
Gotta wonder about folks that pull sh*t like this, then post videos online of themselves doing illegal stuff. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Criminals condemning themselves by posting videos for clout is one of my favorite impacts of tik-tok and youtube.
“Cops say they’re currently asking the public for help to track down the identities of everyone involved, and offering rewards ranging from $250 to $10,000 for tips leading to arrests”
Have you tried Youtube?
You know how some people say Idiocracy turned out to be a documentary? It’s looking more and more like Mad Max is going to be the same.
They will merge in a few years when there is nobody able to maintain a vehicle in running condition.
My wife and I were coming back from our first date in years (read kids) and there were clouds of tire smoke around our neighborhood intersections. Super quiet area well outside Raleigh. Red charger just goes out and does burnouts/really crappy donuts on the farm roads. Guess he does it just for himself. Or he’s practicing
I live in a less-dense suburban area, and there are always fresh burnout marks on the road behind me in the summer. Multiple vehicles, judging from the width and the occasional motorcycle mixed in. I never hear anything from my house.
Burnout and donut marks are common on the outskirts of Wake Forest. Judging by the sounds I hear on early weekend mornings, I think my neighborhood is home to some of the culprits.
I saw my culprit drive deeper into my neighborhood so they definitely live in mine. They are usually up to shenanigans Friday and Saturday nights
This is NOT car culture. Ed is right. This is hoodlum culture (wow, my grandpa would be proud of me using that word).
(We high-five)
Unfortunately I think it is… at least in the eyes of those watching the news we’re all lumped in together.
Agreed. Like art: some of it is shitty (sometimes literally), some is beautiful.
This is an example of shitty car culture.
Ignorant (Stupid) people should not be in charge of defining things then.
That’s pretty typical behavior for Montgomery and Prince George’s county. Especially when Challengers are involved. The ones stollen out of northern Virginia almost always end up in one of those two md counties. Rule of law in both of those is almost non existentant
I’d say ban Dodge muscle cars, but natural attrition from Stellantis execs may take care of it.
I saw someone in a salvage yard trying to find a special Dodge/Jeep quick release radiator hose, or learn how to disconnect a jammed one.
back in the day many of us did stupid stuff and we all did not survive. BUT with the phones and internet the youths are engaging in an ever increasing arms race to out do each other’s idiocy. How do we teach the young not to kill and injure others when doing stupid stuff when their parents are just trying to survive and provide in this economy?
So much this. Thank GOD nobody had a camera when I was doing dumb shit as a kid.
Learning this behavior used to take some effort. You had to wander out and actually find these people. Then you’d move on and there would be no record of what happened and the next group would meet and develop their own version of the same thing.
The break in generations kind of prevented continuous escalation. To every new group, their first street race was THE first street race.
Driver education has ended most places far enough back that the untrained are buying fast cars now.
Just here to say MD is a giant lawless slum. There was a bust this weekend in the other neighboring county. The perps were from Pennsyltucky. No shock there.
I grew up in PA and was always shocked by the further north you got in PSA the deeper it felt like the antebellum south. As I got older I have noticed that it is really the further you get from any city center the deeper south is feels, and the radius of the baseball cap brim curve decreases.
What’s that saying about PA? Philly on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, West Virginia in-between?
Maine is kinda similar – you have Portland and it’s suburbs in the south and then West Virginia all the way to the Canadian border. We called it the “Volvo line”.
WI is Racine to Milwaukee then the rest is rural and red. MN is the Twin cities and then “rocks and cows”. ND is Fargo and Grand Forks then the edge of the earth just drops off just west of them.
But the difference is that in those upper mid-western states, even people in rural areas are “civilized”, and NOTHING like as redneck/true-blue right-leaning (WI more so, but still). I spent a decade all over that area, and there is not the huge divide between the the more and less urban areas the way there is in a lot of other parts of the country. Or the Christian Nationalism so common across the south. Lutherans are typically very nice people. And even the more conservative ones across those areas generally understand the concept of “mind your own damned business” when it comes to their neighbors. If it wasn’t so damned cold I’d live up there.
Fair enough. I both travel and live up here and yes they may hate you but they will generally keep their mouths shut. The hatred rural Minnesotans for Minneapolis has gotten very severe over the last few months.
Bit odd since Minneapolis is pulling out all stops to help the GOP.
I spent a lot of time traveling to WI for work and loved it there. I don’t remember getting stuck in any political discussions, but it was one of the few places outside of the northeast where ball busting and sarcasm are understood and appreciated.
Exactly.
I found that area to be very much like my home area of Southern Maine in many regards, but the people are friendlier as a rule. But genuinely, not the fake “Bless your heart” Southern friendly.
And best of all, cheese curds at every cash register. (fresh and squeaky)
Yummy! I had some last night, oddly enough. Though Buffalo Wild Wings version is not as good as the real thing from WI.
I’m comfortable with bean bag projectiles being deployed here.
Yes, bean bag those a-holes. My thought exactly.
Bean-bag them right in their beanbags, I say
Or some kind of glitter/fart spray combination. Nobody wants to stay around after they reek of eggs and look like they’ve been attacked by strippers.
Hi Mark Rober 😛
Not to get political, but why should the average person respect law and order when our elected officials commit crimes and aren’t even investigated, much less convicted?
I’d say you really aren’t getting political, because though it seems quite brazen right now, elected officials have always had a certain unofficial “immunity”.
Do you know who I am?
You’re no Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.
The generic term for “our betters” is “Epstein Class.”
However, the Venn diagram between the Epstein Class and intersection takeover perps is almost certainly the null set.
Because “my brother did that first” stopped being a valid argument when one reaches the age of 5.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right” is at least usually about wrongs directed between two parties against one another. This is just hurting more of the normal people who are already hurt by lawless elected officials.
This isn’t some kind of rebellion against unjust power. This is “joining in on the fun”.
Because those politicians likely WILL suffer consequences eventually, even if only to reputation and ability to continue in politics?
What is going on currently is NOT going to be the “new normal”, any more than ordinary cars having massive ADM’s was going to be the “new normal” a few years ago after the pandemic during the supply crisis. The pendulum always swings back. Though unfortunately I think the trend towards more conservatism isn’t ending soon, but MAGA will die with Trump. Though I am always willing to be surprised. I have some hope for the kids of today getting fed up enough to do something different, instead of just turning into their parents as they get older.
I’ll never stop doing this crap!
Mostly because I’ll never start doing it, so I have nothing to stop.
“You had me going in the first half, not gonna lie” GIF