If you live in San Francisco, it’s likely you haven’t seen a sideshow, and perhaps you haven’t heard of the gatherings until recently.
Often called “stunt driving” by police and public officials, sideshows originated in the East Bay and South Bay in the 1990s — a mashup of California car cruising, showing off tricked-out rides, and hip-hop swagger. Participants take over intersections, flash-mob style, while cars whip around in circles and into drifts. Drivers and passengers climb out of windows or onto hoods, egged on by giddy crowds with their phones out.
Some SF politicians and residents say sideshows have become more frequent, disruptive, violent in nature, and harder to shut down. Social media, of course, is playing a part: Footage of particularly destructive incidents goes viral, and “takeovers” — sideshows organized by out-of-towners — have become more popular to throw in and around San Francisco.
Now a local lawmaker, backed by the city’s controversial district attorney, wants to deploy surveillance drones to help the police get a handle on what they say is a “growing public safety threat.”
Sup. Rafael Mandelman and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins requested in late April that SF’s technology oversight body, which by law must weigh in on proposed surveillance tech used by city departments, draft a report on the potential impact of unmanned police drones. In a joint statement, Mandelman and Jenkins argued that drones are safer than ground interventions, which carry the potential of escalating incidents. They made no mention, though, of any potential downsides.
The ACLU considers unmanned drones a threat to privacy, and some criminal justice advocates worry about racial profiling. Because of wariness over the impacts of surveillance tools, San Francisco amended its administrative code in 2019 to require the public vetting and approval of any new piece of such technology before it is used by a city government agency.
Mandelman said in his remarks that sideshows required the city to “update our rules” on surveillance tech: “SFPD needs every tool available to make our streets safer.”
But Mandelman and Jenkins are looking to deal with sideshows by deploying technology that is, to date, unproven. Publicly available city data do not support claims that sideshows are becoming more frequent and violent, and neither of these officials’ offices or SFPD was able to provide information to the contrary.
What’s more, it’s not clear whether Mandelman, Jenkins, or even SFPD have tried to learn from how other neighboring communities are using surveillance drones for sideshows. Police in Oakland, one of the most popular cities for sideshows, tell The Frisc there has been no communication with San Francisco officials, despite Mandelman’s office saying the opposite.
Spin the wheel
Sideshows have been concentrated in Districts 9, 10, and 11. In District 8, which is Mandelman’s, there were 13 incidents from 2020 to 2022, including only one last year, according to SFPD incident reports.
Nevertheless, Mandelman said two sideshows in the past year near Dolores Park spurred him to act. One, he noted, took place during the annual Dolores Hill Bomb, a skateboarding event that led to the vandalism of a Waymo car. (There were no reports of stunt driving, unless you count skaters sitting on the Waymo’s roof sensors. Mandelman’s office did not respond to questions asking for further clarification.)
The other also occurred near Dolores Park on the night of April 16. “If we don’t get this under control, it’s only a matter of time before someone dies on our streets due to one of these events,” according to the supervisor.
In the wake of the joint statement on exploring aerial sideshow surveillance, we reached out for more details from both parties. Their offices did not provide specific data, so this reporting is based on publicly available records, information requests, and interviews with experts and observers on whether the sideshow issue is worth the cost of drones and the threats to privacy.
Mandelman eventually replied to questions via email. He wrote that “sideshows have been a persistent problem in [his] district and citywide.” The idea to use drones, he added, was suggested by both SFPD and the district attorney, neither of which returned requests for comment.
SFPD data, in fact, do not show a clear increase or decrease in the frequency of sideshows. According to police reports, stunt driving increased from 72 incidents in 2020 to 114 in 2021. However, it decreased in 2022, where there were only 54 recorded incidents. There have been 29 recorded incidents of stunt driving in 2023 so far. Mandelman’s office did not respond to questions about this discrepancy.
It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions, because incidents were not tagged as related to “sideshows” or “stunt driving” until recent years, and are not consistently tagged as such in surrounding cities. Often, incidents are tagged as a traffic violation, or with other terms reflecting destruction of property or public disturbance. The California Highway Patrol agrees: A public information officer for the law enforcement agency told me that he also has trouble parsing the data because of the labeling.
According to CHP statistics provided to NBC Bay Area reported in May, California has seen 264 crashes, 30 of which were deadly, associated with street racing and sideshows in the past five years. Yet the department was not able to provide region-specific information.
Frequency is one issue; violence is another. Whether sideshows have become more violent is difficult to determine from public records, because whether injuries or fatalities occurred at a sideshow is not explained in incident reports.
SFPD did not return requests for information on injuries, violent altercations, or criminal citations over the years. Most cars do not cross speeds worthy of a felony citation, a source who watches sideshows said, though drivers do often lose control of their vehicles. Fans looking on are sometimes injured, though typically because they are walking into the circle of spinning cars. Other bystanders, particularly those who try to disrupt the sideshow or call the authorities, can be met with aggression. (In May, for example, videos showed a man in Oakland throwing an object at a sideshow car, and then being badly beaten.)
Watching the show
Unmanned, unarmed drones are becoming increasingly popular with local law-enforcement agencies in the United States, and NIH research suggests they can become a flash point for differing views on police themselves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, says drones “raise significant issues” for privacy and public safety, and has sued the Federal Aviation Administration to find out which agencies have applied to use them.
A report from the Department of Justice’s Police Executive Research Forum, however, argues that drones can improve police effectiveness, and that care must be taken to inform the public of their safety benefits.
SF has its own layer of oversight, which the Mandelman-Jenkins request has triggered. The Committee on Information Technology (COIT) is required to work with any department that intends to use surveillance technology, like SFPD. COIT writes reports and also reviews policy before sending it to the Board of Supervisors for approval.
COIT is not required to provide the report by a specific date. It remains to be seen if the committee draws upon the experience of Los Angeles and Oakland, which authorize police to use drones to collect information on reckless drivers. OPD spent $80,000 on drones last spring, and uses them to surveil sideshows.
Are they working? Oakland 911 data do not show a significant change in the frequency of sideshow reports after drones were implemented. OPD did not respond to a request for monthly numbers on sideshow frequency, injury, or property damage.
San Jose police also use drones, although the department did not respond to questions whether they are used specifically against sideshows. (A 700-person sideshow bust was carried out last November with the help of an “air support team,” which also includes helicopters.)
LAPD also has drones but did not answer questions on whether stunt-driving surveillance falls under the approved uses for them.
It also remains to be seen if SF will follow other cities’ leads in criminalizing sideshow complicity. Oakland has made publicizing or facilitating a sideshow, which ostensibly could include posting about it on social media, punishable by either a $1,000 fine or months of jail time. San Jose has made it illegal to post about or even watch sideshows.
The Frisc spoke with the owners of two Instagram accounts who document sideshows, under the condition that their usernames would not be shared. Participants frequently declined or ignored invitations to speak with me, with one saying they didn’t want “eyes on [their] account.”
I asked Mandelman whether his staff or the DA have consulted with other cities for drone data and best practices as they look to shape SF policy. He said that SFPD’s Stunt Driving Response Unit coordinates with surrounding jurisdictions. Kim Armstead, a press dispatcher for OPD, said there has been no communication between OPD and either DA Jenkins or Sup. Mandelman’s offices, nor between OPD and SFPD regarding the city’s use of drones.
The SF district attorney’s office did not return calls or emails asking about coordination with other DAs on this issue.
Unlike law enforcement, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, which is in charge of city streets, was willing to talk about sideshows. SFMTA has traded ideas with engineers in other cities, according to spokesperson Steven Chun. SFMTA has outfitted six intersections, flagged by the SFPD, with hardened centerlines and speed bumps called Bott’s dots that make stunt driving more difficult. Twelve more intersections are in the works for modifications.
While street planners put down dots and barriers to deter sideshows, SF’s lawmakers have to wait. Mandelman said he’s looking to COIT for a policy recommendation that “balances giving SFPD the enforcement tools they need to deter sideshows, while balancing legitimate concerns about personal privacy.” He’s also pushing SFPD to ramp up enforcement of major traffic violations.
The city’s 39 traffic deaths last year were the highest during its “Vision Zero” era — a pledge made 10 years ago to eliminate fatalities by 2024. Chun confirmed that none of those deaths were caused by sideshows, and a local crime expert says the drone policy should proceed with caution.
“I would hope that drone images are to be used as only the first step in the investigation process, after which there will be more investigation on the ground to ensure they have the right people,” said Kim Richman, professor of law and criminology at the University of San Francisco. “To me, stunt driving itself is not my main priority as a SF citizen, and I would hate for this to be just another opportunity to criminalize more people of color.”
