Over the weekend, drivers shut down streets and highways around Cleveland to perform tricks, including at West 25th Street and Lorain; East 185th Street and Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard and at East 55th Street and Woodland Avenue, even on Interstate 90.
The drivers were participating in street takeovers or what’s known elsewhere as sideshows.
Ideastream Public Media’s Josh Boose spoke with reporter Matt Richmond about these incidents, how they started and what police are doing to respond.
Josh Boose: What are we talking about here? I've heard it referred to as street takeovers, sideshows, sighting, hooning, exhibition driving. What do these all entail?
Matt Richmond: They're all terms for basically stunt driving on public roads. It's usually souped up or muscle cars doing doughnuts in intersections for crowds of people.
Drivers are showing off — taking over the street for some time. And then bystanders or passengers are filming and posting to social media.
They're organized in advance. But, according to Cleveland police, much of the organizing occurs on private social media sites.
Josh Boose: These street takeovers popped up around town over the weekend, leading to a pretty rare Sunday news conference by Cleveland's chief of police. What did Annie Todd, the chief here, say about what happened and about the police response to this?
Matt Richmond: Chief Todd said the police heard about these takeovers via Instagram, and they went out and tried to break them up. She wouldn't share how many arrests were made. You know, one of the challenges — police have to know for sure that the registered owner of a car that maybe they got from a photo or one of the videos that was posted or surveillance camera — that that registered owner was actually driving the car during the street takeover.
And so Chief Todd said that they're still sorting out who to charge.
It appears now that the police will be looking to crack down. They'll try to charge participants with more serious crimes than just traffic tickets. And Todd also said that bystanders could be charged for filming or for blocking roads elsewhere.
Where we've seen these street takeovers, we've seen police come in and impound vehicles, sometimes lots of vehicles all at once.... That may serve as one of the strongest deterrents since this is about showing off cars.
Josh Boose: And these aren't just a Cleveland phenomenon right now.
Matt Richmond: Cleveland police believe that this weekend's incidents were organized in part, at least by someone in Cincinnati. And this kind of thing goes back decades to at least 25 years ago in Oakland, California, according to reporting from over the summer by NPR.
And that's where the name sideshow comes from. This sort of activity took off in a lot of places during the pandemic. And listeners might remember here there was a lot of attention on street takeovers by huge groups of ATV riders around the pandemic time.
Josh Boose: I remember that. What about a city response, though?
Matt Richmond: I've been told that they're working on it.
In Birmingham, Alabama where they've had a lot of street takeovers. Officials would try to predict where they would occur and go to those intersections and put in rubber speed bumps. And that is something that could be applied here because we saw them over the weekend, at busy nighttime intersections like East 55th and Woodland or West 25th and Lorain. There's also a state law taking effect in October that specifically bans takeovers and attaches criminal penalties to them and to stunt driving in general.
Josh Boose: So things could change. Matt Richmond, thanks for joining us.
Matt Richmond: Thanks, Josh.
UPDATE: Monday afternoon, Mayor Justin Bibb posted on X about the takeovers, saying, "The collective voices of our residents, visitors, business owners and other community members is clear. We need to bring the full weight of the law down upon this type of illegal activity."
The city is creating a task force with detectives from all five police districts to investigate the takeovers and is also exploring street milling and the use of rubber pellets in parts on streets where the takeovers are likely to occur in the future, according to city spokesperson Tyler Sinclair.
