One person killed and another shot after hundreds of people take part in illegal sideshow,Oakland CA

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OAKLAND POLICE
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On Sunday, January 17, 2021, the Oakland Police Department addressed numerous sideshows throughout the city, which involved multiple shooting scenes, including one gunshot victim, and hundreds of participants. The criminal activity spanned the entire day and required multiple patrol officers to respond out of their districts, impacting our ability to respond to service. The sideshows began around noon with more than 300 All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) and dirt bikes driving recklessly throughout the City of Oakland. According to CHP, some of these participants later rode their vehicles into oncoming traffic on the Bay Bridge as they tried to flee from officers. CHP says a passenger of a motorcycle was fatally struck by a vehicle after falling from the motorcycle. At 6:11 PM, OPD’s Communications Division began to receive calls regarding illegal sideshow activity in the area of 22nd Avenue and East 12th Street. Upon arrival, officers encountered roughly 300 pedestrians and upwards of 150 vehicles taking part in an illegal sideshow. Some within the crowd pointed lasers at officers in an attempt to disable them. Around 7:08 PM, some of the officers had to be diverted to 35th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard to respond to calls of more than a dozen shots fired. Arriving officers found a victim suffering from apparent gunshot(s) wounds. Additional officers had to be reassigned from sideshow enforcement to this active scene, as a large crowd of sideshow participants arrived. The crime scene needed to be secured to allow Falck and OFD to render medical aid to the victim. While our sideshow enforcement details have been discontinued for this fiscal year due to budgetary constraints, community safety is paramount and patrol officers will respond as available. The past two weekends have seen a resurgence of active and aggressive sideshows in our city, and we ask the public to please avoid the area if you see a sideshow developing, and call 911 if there is an emergency or immediate safety threat. We also have an email tipline sideshowtips@oaklandca.gov to report information regarding illegal sideshows, including vehicles and people involved in this activity. The email is an alternative to our non-emergency number (510) 777-3333 and is an additional means of collecting information about illegal sideshows.









Oakland Police said they responded to numerous sideshows throughout the city in Sunday which also involved multiple shooting scenes, including one that resulted in an injured gunshot victim.

Hundreds of people and vehicles participated in the criminal activity over the course of the entire day and required multiple patrol officers to respond out of their districts, impacting our ability to respond to service.

Earlier Tuesday, authorities confirmed that a Stockton man was arrested on suspicion of murder after his passenger died while they were involved in a California Highway Patrol pursuit of a group of dirt bikers who created mayhem on the streets of Oakland, San Francisco and on the span.

Humza Zahoor, 20, has been booked into the San Francisco County jail in connection with the Sunday crash that killed 20-year-old Christopher Lee of Beaumont, Texas.

RELATED: San Francisco Dirt Bike Gang Mayhem Ends With Death On Bay Bridge

Oakland police said the sideshows began around noon with more than 300 All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) and dirt bikes driving recklessly throughout Oakland.

According to the CHP, officers initially responded just after 5 p.m. for a report of a sideshow involving as many as 15 dirt bikes heading toward the Bay Bridge.

When CHP patrol cars encountered the bikes on the bridge’s eastbound lanes, the riders allegedly turned around and began heading in the wrong direction.

The riders then exited at the Sterling Street and Fourth Street off-ramps, traversed downtown San Francisco and re-entered the bridge the wrong way on the Fremont Street on-ramp, heading east on the upper deck of the westbound Bay Bridge.

Lee, who was part of the group of dirt bike riders, then crashed his bike near the Treasure Island ramp, prompting another biker from the group, later identified as Zahoor, to pick up Lee, CHP officials said.

As officers pursued the pair, Zahoor attempted to evade officers by trying to jump a median wall. Zahoor, however, crashed into the wall, causing Lee to be ejected onto the Bay Bridge, where a pickup truck struck and killed him.

The sideshow activity continued in Oakland following the fatal accident on the bridge, according to police. At 6:11 p.m., OPD received calls regarding illegal sideshow activity in the area of 22nd Avenue and East 12th Street.

Arriving officers found roughly 300 pedestrians and upwards of 150 vehicles taking part in an illegal sideshow. Some within the crowd pointed lasers at officers in an attempt to disable them.

Around 7:08 p.m., some of the officers were diverted to 35th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard to respond to reports of more than a dozen shots fired. Arriving officers found a victim suffering from apparent gunshot wounds.

Additional officers were reassigned from sideshow enforcement to the active shooting scene as a large crowd of sideshow participants arrived.

Oakland police said “the past two weekends have seen a resurgence of active and aggressive sideshows.” Police are asking the public to avoid the area if they see a sideshow developing. Residents are asked to call 911 if there is an emergency or immediate safety threat.



[Interlude]
"It's a everyday thing
Every Saturday night, brothers be tearin' up cars
Brothers be comin through swingin' ‘em
I don't know what's goin on, I'm juiced
I'm in the Town, I strikes through
I see girls, corner to corner, block to block
You know, basically it's just (Funky) "

 

[Hater Eraser]

 

[Hater Eraser]

 

[Ezekiel 25:17]

Wish there was a big car scene near me like that.

 

[ZEupTWN]

Song?

 

[CouldntBeMeTho]

Damn i shoulda taken my ass outside

 

[Hater Eraser]

Song?

" What you know " - Big Thump

 

[Hater Eraser]

Wish there was a big car scene near me like that.

" Shirley " wants to know how it all started ..


Spinning Cars: the History of the Oakland Sideshow



Cars swerving back and forth, spinning in circles; the sound of tires screeching against concrete; the smell of burnt rubber. The cheers of those standing on the sidelines.

It’s not NASCAR. It’s not "The Fast and the Furious."

This is the sideshow. And it started in Oakland.

Bay Curious listener Shirley Yuen moved to Oakland six years ago and has seen sideshows only on the news.

“I had to do a Wikipedia search after the news just to see what this is about. Why are people taking their cars out and doing all these crazy stunts?" asks Shirley.

Now Shirley wants to know ...

“What's up with sideshows? Why are they in Oakland? And how did crime become associated with them?”




Sideshow Beginnings

The original sideshows were not dangerous or nefarious. They were pop-up parties -- part car show, part block party.

They first bubbled up in mall parking lots of Deep East Oakland in the 1980s, says Sean Kennedy, a multimedia producer and local hip-hop historian.

“It seems like it started when hip-hop first got out here,” Kennedy says.

I meet him at the entrance to the Foods Co in Foothill Square. It's so deep into East Oakland it is almost San Leandro. Kennedy says this is where it all began.

“There was a carnival that used to exist right here in Foothill Square, because there was a skating rink right here,” he says. “All the people would come down here to the skating rink and the carnival. They would bring their best cars and just cruise."



Kennedy says that what many people think of as a sideshow these days, all doughnuts and destruction, was not the way it began. Back then, “no one did doughnuts or spun their cars.” It was just peacocking, showing off the cars that were the pride and joy of many -- mostly male -- residents. “That,” Kennedy says, “was the original sideshow of East Oakland.”

People had cruised around in their souped-up Chevys before, but it was as if the introduction of the new music taught the cars to dance.

As sideshows spread, Kennedy says, they became a sort of cultural marketplace. People repped parties, hawked homemade fashion lines and shared the latest beats and music.

It was always firmly rooted in a sense of place, Kennedy says. "It's in the soil. For some reason the air here in East Oakland breeds that kind of creativity."

The Sideshow as Cultural Marketplace
Yakpasua Zazaboi documented sideshows across East Oakland for his documentary series "Sydewayz."

According to Zazaboi, sideshows were part craft fair, part improv performance, and always a place to catch the cultural zeitgeist. The sideshows, he says, were not just part of Oakland's unique hyphy culture: They formed the space in which hyphy was born.

“You would come out and you would really understand what is popular in Oakland,” Zazaboi says. A key part of that was the music. “I think for about three or four years straight, we used to hear this song by a group called 3X Krazy.”





“It was just a baseline and it was so popular and would sound so good on really nice audio systems, it was almost like a sideshow theme," Zazaboi says.

When asked to name his pick for the theme of the sideshows, Sean Kennedy says there is really only one: Richie Rich’s sideshow song.

“Now that's a classic when it comes to explaining the sideshow, in the early days,” says Kennedy.

You can hear the whole sideshow in Richie Rich’s deep and sonorous voice. “In Oakland, California," he raps, "every Saturday night brothers be riding, straight-laced zeniths, drop-tops, buckets, high performance.”

Music might have been the lifeblood of the sideshow but, according to Kennedy, the heart pumping that blood was the neighborhood's deep-rooted car culture.

Sideshows Run Into the Law
Everyone has a story about when and how things got out of hand. Zazaboi says it was when guys with cheap cars started doing doughnuts to get attention.

Sean Kennedy says it was when the new built-for-speed Mustangs came on the market in the 1980s.

Maybe it was the death of a young girl during a police chase after a sideshow got busted in the mid-'90s.

Whatever the exact moment, the crackdown by Oakland police and the city were swift. New laws were introduced that criminalized sideshow spectators, you could be fined, even arrested, for just watching. Then came a 2005 ordinance, which allowed police to permanently confiscate any car directly involved in a sideshow. According to Zazaboi, that made it personal.

“Their car is an extension of their ego,” Zazaboi says of sideshow participants. “You take away their car, you kill their ego, and that is exactly what they did out here in Oakland.”

Sean Kennedy says that response complicated the already tense relationship between police and the community.

"Does that create an animosity to the police?" Kennedy asks. "It becomes a war at that point. And then it becomes a situation where the rebellion is, 'We're going to have sideshows anyway.' "

Both Kennedy and Zazaboi say that while local politicians criminalized the sideshow, local media demonized it, with story after story of violent, out-of-control youth taking over the streets.



Kennedy admits that bad stuff did go down, and there was by necessity a kind of nomadic, extra-legal element to the sideshows. People brought guns and sold drugs; sometimes fights broke out. And yes, young men acted stupid. But he says all that was just as likely to happen at a Raiders game.

Kennedy says despite all that, the sideshow did not breed criminal behavior.

"It's not about a car show," he says. "At that point, it's about arresting black youth in Oakland."

He says the sideshow made it easy to paint East Oakland youth into an already-made stereotype: "Young black kids who don’t have anything to do with their lives, out there playing around in these cars, carrying guns and selling drugs.”

Celebrating the Sideshow

What was lost in that narrative, Kennedy says, was the ingenuity of the sideshow: the mechanical skills it took to work on the cars, the driving skills it took to get them moving and dancing, the coordination to plan what are in essence the Bay Area's first pop-up events. Long before pop-up events was even a term.

Kennedy acknowledges his perspective has changed with age. Now that he has a few years on him, he is a little more weary of making cars spin like whirling dervishes.

"As much as I love sideshows," he says, "it’s a dangerous culture when it comes to spinning around a half-a-ton vehicle with no barriers and people standing there."

That is why Kennedy, among others, supported a push to legalize sideshows that gained some ground in the late 2000s. The suggestion was to bring sideshows out of the shadows and turn them into neighborhood street parties. They could even make money, proponents argued.

But opponents, like City Councilman Larry Reid, who represents Deep East Oakland, countered that it was folly for the city to sanction an illegal activity.

Reid says the sideshows slowed down for a bit, but they seem to have picked up once again.

If you ask Yakpasua Zazaboi, he will say what is happening now is not even a real sideshow.

"I break it down like this now," Zazaboi says. "This is how you know it's a sideshow. If there are clean cars and women out there, you might have a sideshow. If it's a bunch of buckets and a whole bunch of dudes clowning around looking at each other -- you do not have sideshow."

The definition of just what makes a sideshow is constantly in flux. Every generation has its own version, just like every sideshow has people who say it is either a criminal act or a space for the creation of culture. Maybe, just maybe, there is a little bit of both, hanging out at the sideshow.

 

[ZEupTWN]

" What you know " - Big Thump

shyt go hard

 

[Hater Eraser]

Damn i shoulda taken my ass outside

Yea the bikes was out for the MLK weekend fr fr ..

 

[Taco]

Obligatory

 

[Hater Eraser]