Combat Street Racing With New Tactics : A Deadly San Fernando Valley Tradition Must Be Vigorously Opposed by Police

Hundreds of youths from Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, and Riverside counties regularly gather with their cars at night in the northern San Fernando Valley for illegal, high-speed street races. Typical sites are sections of San Fernando Road, Bradley Avenue, and San Fernando Mission and Sepulveda boulevards, in or around Sylmar, north and east of the San Diego and Golden State freeways.

This hazardous practice is part of a longstanding tradition of more than 20 years, and the dangers should be obvious. These are not professional drag-racers with meticulously maintained vehicles designed for ultra-high speeds. The drivers are not strapped in with arm restraints or neck braces, and they don’t have helmets or fire-retardant clothing. Spectators foolish enough to attend these events are not protected by crash barriers. And the cause for concern for the safety of others extends far beyond the illicit race sites. Last Sunday, for example, an innocent family was rear-ended and ejected from their vehicle by a teen-ager who was allegedly racing with other vehicles on the way to one of the illegal events. The mother was killed, and both children were seriously injured in the crash.

So, what is to be done?

There is much to be said for a strong police presence, such as a successful effort on Long Island in New York that greatly reduced street racing at a nationally popular location for such activities. Budget cuts killed that enforcement effort, however, and the Los Angeles Police Department faces similar constraints.

Officials in Jacksonville, Fla., decided that watching illegal street racing was a crime, too, and promptly rounded up 70 spectators at one site. A fiscal problem arises here, too, however, for a criminal justice system in Los Angeles that is already bursting at the seams.

We have another idea, which would be to enlist informants or an officer or two with sufficiently youthful features to carry cameras or video cameras to the race sites to document activities, particularly license plates. When this was employed at an illegal street race site in Virginia, the racers even mugged for the camera, believing some interested spectator was chronicling their exploits. They learned otherwise when enough citations arrived in the mail, for reckless driving, reckless endangerment, speeding and the like, to deep-six their licenses for months to come.

Los Angeles police should also begin to begin to work with their counterparts in adjacent counties, since a good number of the illegal racers hail from those areas. Police in Washington, D.C., and neighboring Virginia and Maryland now share information and tactics to combat particular forms of crime. The same should be encouraged here.