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Fast cars, furious residents

Episode Summary

Street races. Street takeovers. Car enthusiasts in Los Angeles and beyond are holding events that are angering seemingly everyone else.

Episode Notes

Street takeovers. Street races. Burnouts. They’re the latest manifestations of car culture in the region — cousins to the drag races, lowrider cruises, V-dub love-ins and other gear-head gatherings that’ve gone on here for decades. But what you’re seeing right now — a lot of people say the scene feels different. And some people say the film franchise “Fast & Furious” is to blame.

In a region where car culture is king and stunts are all over social media, residents, politicians and law enforcement have had enough. Read the full transcript here.

Host: Gustavo Arellano

Guests: L.A. Times reporter Nathan Solis

More reading:

Inside L.A.’s deadly street takeover scene: ‘A scene of lawlessness’

19 cars seized, 27 arrested in illegal street takeover in Pomona

LA Times Today: Dangerous street takeovers take a deadly toll on L.A.

Episode Transcription

Tape: Car tires screeching on the pavement and revving engines

Gustavo Arellano: It feels like no matter where you’re looking in Southern California right now, you're seeing more and more tire marks on asphalt. The telltale sign of burned rubber.

Street takeovers. Street races. They’re the latest manifestations of car culture in the region, cousins to the drag races, lowrider cruises, V-dub love-ins and so much more that have gone on here for decades. 

But what you’re seeing right now…  

A lot of people say the scene … feels different. 

What’s happening right now is organized through Instagram posts who have just enough information about where and when to meet, but not enough to tip off police.

Hundreds of people then descend onto an intersection or a stretch of road, even freeways, to watch cars do all sorts of tricks that can quickly turn deadly. 

News clip: Witnesses say an SUV crashed into a red sedan at a Compton intersection, fatally injuring two.
News clip: If you wanna race, go to a racetrack, a legal racetrack, but the best thing to do is not do it at all.

Gustavo: These so-called side shows have been around for a while, but exploded in popularity during the pandemic.

Tape: Car tires screeching on the pavement and revving engines

Gustavo: I gotta admit all this looks cool, like a game of “Grand Theft Auto.” It takes a lot of skills to be able to weave in and out of traffic, or do donuts with your friends, while they’re hanging out of windows, you know? But car accidents, pedestrian deaths, stabbings and shootings at them, are happening more and more.

Theresa Fiallos (tape): It's very unsafe. You cannot go out and walk. You cannot ride a bike. This is, it takes away the quiet enjoyment of your housing, because this happens at all hours of the day and night.

Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to “The Times,” essential news from the L.A. Times. It's Friday, September 9th, 2022. Today, in a region where car culture is king and stunts are all over social media, residents, politicians and law enforcement have had enough.

Carlos Montes (tape): We're sick and tired of people racing and causing accidents, you know?

Gustavo: My L.A. Times colleague Nathan Solis is a reporter on the Fast Break desk and has followed the latest backlash against the latest car-culture trend. This time, it's those takeovers. And also street racing. Nathan, welcome to “The Times.” 

Nathan Solis: Thanks for having me on.

Gustavo: So you went to Angelino Heights, which is a historic L.A. neighborhood, but it's also home to a lot of the landmarks from the “Fast & Furious” franchise, which is going to release its 10th installment next year. So why'd you go? 

Nathan: So there was a growing backlash against the filming for this particular installment of the “Fast & Furious” franchise. 

Protest tape: Street racing kills. Race on a track. 

Nathan: Residents feel like it's glorifying the street takeover and street racing culture, but also because it feels like the film has sort of dropped a hand grenade and run away by making it an iconic landmark for gearheads to do burnouts and race up and down this residential street, um, surrounded by Victorian homes. The residents have been trying for years to get some type of reaction from the city and the movie studios. 

Protest tape: Universal Studios does not wanna be a good partner with this community…. They don't respect us. It damages all of us in tiny little ways that can never be quantified.

Nathan: The “Fast & Furious” franchise bounces across the globe, and I think even in the last one, they went into space.

Tape: Man, this is insane. We are headed to outer space. You acting like we on our way to Home Depot.

Gustavo: Yeah, they like, they're jumping off buildings with Lamborghinis. It's quite the franchise.

Nathan: It's remarkable, a cinematic tour de force. But I'm not entirely sure if the movies have returned to Angelino Heights since the first movie. So this gave residents an opportunity to renew their complaint.

Protest tape: It's gotten worse, very, uh, how can I say this? A lackadaisical approach from the city to try to help out.

Nathan: So I went to these protests outside of the Bob's Market in Angelino Heights. And there were probably about, maybe 50 protesters, and I got a chance to talk to one resident, Rene Favela. He has lived in Angelino Heights for 17 years now. And he described how the films have changed the neighborhood.

Rene Favela (tape): You know, the studios have gotten bigger with their productions and bigger and bigger and bigger, which causes an inconvenience. But you know, the movie brings on a lot of, uh, um, you know, you don't wanna say it encourages the street racing, but it doesn't help. We get people to come here all the time, every day to do their donuts. Because of the movie, they take pictures in front of the market, yeah. In front of the market. And in some weird way, they feel like they're a part of the movie or something.

Nathan: I also talked to Bella, who spoke at the protest in Angelino Heights, and she shared about how her everyday life has been impacted by this continual street racing.

Bella (tape): And after I started to have a family within the next couple of years, this problem starts to develop in my neighborhood, literally practically right outside my door. Every single day, I've had to deal with waking up in the middle of the night, having restless sleep, being completely thrown off on my day, because I have to deal with this every single day, day in and day out at nighttime, maybe at three to four to five times in the middle of the night.

Nathan: I spoke with another woman, Theresa Fiallos, who manages a property in Angelino Heights. She said that the street racing has left its marks on the neighborhood. 

Crosstalk (tape): There's uh, lots of, uh, tire markings where they do donuts, you know, continuously. 

 

Nathan (tape): The burnouts and things like that. 


Theresa (tape): Burnouts also here on Marion and Sunset right there, half a block away. During pandemic, the street was taken over many, many times. Large crowds, very dangerous, to do more car stunts.

Gustavo: This franchise really is iconic. I mean, to the point where now Angelino Heights and that Bob's Market's is a tourist attraction.

Nathan: Yeah, I got the chance to meet two people on vacation from Italy: Sarah and Roberto. And they came specifically to see where the movies had been filmed. Roberto being a big fan.

Nathan (tape): It's a very American movie. Would you agree? It's an American movie. It feels like America? 
Sarah and Roberto (tape): Sí, sí, sí, sí, sí. It's like muscle cars and, um, it's a typical American film,  American movie that in Italy we saw, you saw this film. If you think about, yeah, it's an American movie. No doubt. 

Nathan: That’s true. There's no doubt. Yeah.

Gustavo: Nathan. So this protest in Angelino Heights came at like, you know, what do they say, kismet time, because there's been a lot of attention paid in Southern California this year to those types of tricks that the “Fast & Furious” franchise glamorized. But what are the actual numbers on burnouts, street takeovers, street racing going on right now in the Southland?

Nathan: So we'll compare it to last year. The first six months of 2021, there were 500 reported street takeovers, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. For the same timeframe for 2022, we've seen about 700 street takeovers. And that number is probably growing as we speak.

Gustavo: And when did the LAPD start tracking these street takeovers?

Nathan: Well, obviously street takeovers predate the “Fast & Furious” franchise, and the type of information that the LAPD has been tracking goes back at least five or six years when street racing and takeover is really ramped up.

Gustavo: And it's not just the numbers of takeovers that's getting a lot of attention. It's also the dangers involved in them.

Nathan: So we've seen in the last eight months or so, at least six people have been killed in or near street takeovers.

We've seen people shot. We've seen people involved in fatal car accidents, and those are instances that all occurred in the South L.A. area. Uh, two people were shot and killed while they were spectating a takeover in Compton. Uh, two more people were killed in a crash at a site near a takeover.

So the violence in danger is exactly what residents in Angelino Heights are talking about. Bella said it's exactly why she was there at the protest because she wants to make sure another tragedy doesn't happen in her own neighborhood.

Bella (tape): It doesn't take a smart person to figure out that if you lose control, you're gonna hit somebody or something. Are we gonna wait for this to happen to one of our neighbors, our children, before somebody cries out for, for action to take place? Or are we gonna do it before it happens? ’Cause you know what? I don't wanna wait for this to happen to me, my family or my child, my neighbor, so that I can start to cry about it and say, do something.

Nathan: And I talked with one person, David Castillo, who lives in Compton. He was actually hit by someone who was doing donuts at the intersection of Wilmington and Stockwell. 

David (tape): That's when he actually, all of a sudden I heard that he actually was doing burning donuts again. That's when he actually hit us right in the, in the rear, driver rear side, right where my daughter was actually sitting. 

Gustavo: More after the break.

Gustavo: Nathan, you kind of mentioned this earlier, but when I see these street takeovers, these burnouts, street racing, it's kind of not a big surprise because it's such a part of Southern California culture. It's car culture. I mean the Beach Boys were singing songs about fast cars, and my colleague Daniel Miller did a whole podcast, “Larger than Life,” about a street racing legend. And I like cars. I think you like cars, but not everyone necessarily knows about it. So maybe you should give us some history about how Southern California's street scene with cars has evolved over the decades.

Nathan: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Cars and street racing go hand-in-hand in Southern California. George Lucas famously featured a drag race in his movie “American Graffiti.”

“American Graffiti” clip: Wow. He's really fast isn't he? Yeah, but he's stupid. [Drag racing sounds]

Nathan: So we have this idea of street racing that was around and stagnated through the 1980s. And then it got a bit more ramped up and that's kind of what the argument with the residents in Angelino Heights are making about the “Fast & Furious” franchise, is that all of a sudden you started to see much more dangerous street racing, uh, careening through residential neighborhoods. And it's not exactly a one-to-one comparison to say that “Fast & Furious” is the reason why street racing and takeovers are so popular now, but it definitely had a hand in making that push. And so now we're starting to see a distinction between street racing and cruising, which is, you know, back in the days when people would get in cars and just drive up and down Whittier Boulevard. And so both are a part of car culture, but totally different because cruising is nice and easy and slow and street racing has this very, I don't know, I don't wanna say nefarious element, but people are definitely much more afraid when they hear a street racer coming down their street.

Gustavo: And then you have just taking over an intersection or a freeway with just crazy-ass donuts. That's a whole other thing.

Nathan: Yeah. I mean, I went over to, um, a street takeover in Compton…

Tape: Sounds of car doing donuts

Nathan: It was like one minute it was a completely empty intersection. And then within maybe 15 minutes, there were hundreds of people standing around watching cars careening around, burning rubber, burning their brake pads. Really just letting loose in this neighborhood.

Tape: Sounds of car doing donuts

Nathan: It felt like this type of communal event, but it also had a criminal element to it. I only laughed because it felt so odd to be surrounded by all these people who are not saying anything, but we're all just looking at the middle of this pit, sort of like a, like a gladiator event. I talked to a few people there. Uh, they were not happy that I was talking to them for a story. But they were not really impressed when I told them that people were getting hurt or residents were upset. They said that they weren't hurting anyone because they were doing this in the middle of the night. 

Gustavo: One of the things about car culture is that law enforcement was always on them, always cracking down on cruising, always cracking down on drag racing. But how has law enforcement and city officials responded to this latest rise in street takeovers?

Nathan: So police say that they're putting together their own coordinated task force. But it's  more or less, a lot of times, ineffective. Police say that they're outnumbered when they go to a street takeover and they cannot safely stop the event, because you'll have two officers for 200 people and multiple vehicles that are gonna be going in a hundred different directions. LAPD traffic Cmdr. Al Pasos shared with me some of the challenges law enforcement have been facing.

Al (tape): The difference with these, what makes these so unique is, A, it's in a vehicle and B, they're usually, uh, surrounded by crowds. These folks have taken their massive numbers and they're able to block all the availability for the officers to enter. And if they try to enter on foot, um, now we're resulting in confrontations with some of these other individuals that are part of the crowd. So we have to, unfortunately, allow kind of this thing to occur until we have a number of resources in play to attempt to disrupt this and to get them to cease their activity and then leave the area.

Nathan: I asked about enforcement efforts when I talked to Theresa, one of the Angelino Heights residents. 

Nathan (tape): What has the response been like from the city of Los Angeles? 

Theresa (tape): We have had no response. They did put up these plastic bollards, but that was after years and years of group emails and Zoom calls. 

Nathan: Another person I spoke to, Damian Kevitt, he's the executive director and founder of the nonprofit Streets Are for Everyone. And he said that the city is prioritizing profit over the safety of residents.

Damian (tape): And that's really what this is about. This is, you know, in Angelino Heights, basically the city of L.A. has prioritized the short-term profits of NBC Universal over the health of the community and the long-term effects of continuing to popularize this location as a destination for street racers and not doing anything about it.

Gustavo: So in terms of enforcement, I’ve seen on Instagram that the LAPD posts stuff to, like, try to shame people from participating in burnouts or illegal races. How’s that working out? 

Nathan: Yeah. So the LAPD has an unofficial street racer account where they will post videos and photos of people in their buckets, whipping around intersections, and then they'll follow up those images with those same cars on the back of tow trucks. 

Gustavo: Huh. 

Nathan: And they basically want people to know that they will have consequences for street racing and participating in takeovers.

Gustavo: You have law enforcement cracking down, but city officials are also talking about putting fines on folks. I know in the city of Santa Ana, like they tried to outlaw street racing and that they were told that it was unconstitutional to do something like that.

Nathan: Yeah. So the city attorney's office in Los Angeles is building cases against street racers to either permanently seize their vehicles or impound them for 30 days. And they're hoping that this is a deterrent. The city of Los Angeles is also looking into fining people for actually sharing information about street takeovers on social media. And you can also be fined for spectating at one of these events.

Gustavo: And you also talked to Compton Mayor Emma Sharif. What did she tell you about street takeovers of the city?

Nathan: Well, she told me that the city has added cameras at intersections where takeovers occur frequently. And after I talked to her, the city installed ceramic bumps. They're called Botts’ Dots, um, at four intersections to deter takeovers.

Emma (tape): And we are just trying to make sure, that we make sure that we take care of our citizens and make sure that we have covered all our bases when it comes down to trying to address this issue.

Nathan: But, unfortunately, you have also seen some people doing donuts on the Botts’ Dots. So it's been like a challenge gauntlet thrown down to the takeover community.

Gustavo: More after the break.

Gustavo: Nathan, all this that we’re talking about – street racing, burnouts – they've been a thing in Southern California and across the world for a while now, but it seems people who aren’t connected to car culture, started to learn more and more about this all year as it went on and got more and more angry. But then when there was a new bridge that opened in L.A. this summer, that’s when the issue and the anger got even bigger. 

Nathan: Yeah, so the Sixth Street Bridge, or the Sixth Street Viaduct, is the newest addition in Los Angeles infrastructure. It's this massive, beautiful, lovely bridge that connects Boyle Heights to downtown Los Angeles. It also happens to be the reason why street takeovers are getting such a huge spotlight on them, because the street takeover scene looked at the bridge and thought, “Heck yeah, I want to go do a donut on that.”

And so now you have residents in Boyle Heights and other surrounding neighborhoods who are upset because the LAPD continuously closed down the bridge every time somebody would do something that looked illegal. So the first few nights there were some people doing donuts and then there were other activities. And so it's just become this real flashpoint.

So I got a chance to speak to Carlos Montez. He grew up in East L.A., and now lives in Boyle Heights, and he's all about car culture, but the takeovers are a bit too much for him. 

Carlos (tape): We don't want anybody coming in, you know, taking over the bridge and, and showing off their hot rod cars, you know, and causing trouble. Now I come from uh, from, you know, Boyle Heights, East L.A. I love cruising. I cruise. You know, and uh, but taking over the street and blocking it to other cars and, and pedestrians is not cool.

Gustavo: Finally, Nathan, how long do you see this trend lasting?

Nathan: That's the million dollar question, isn't it? I mean, street takeovers are gonna be part of the Los Angeles culture. But it's not just in Los Angeles; it's across the world. And as long as there's a car culture, there's going to be people who want to go fast in circles.

Tape: Burnout sounds 

Gustavo: Nathan. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Nathan: Thanks so much for having me.

Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of “The Times,” essential news from the L.A. Times. Kinsee Morlan and Madalyn Amato were the jefas on this episode and Mike Heflin mixed and mastered it. 

Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato.

Big thanks to former Fast Break news intern Itzel Luna for sharing some of her audio and interviews with us.

Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Shani Hilton, Heba Elorbany and Jazmín Aguilera. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. 

 I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back next week with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.