San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Street-racing crackdown is a rough road
About midnight Oct. 26, dozens of police, backed by a helicopter, swept down on hundreds of muscle car owners and admirers at multiple gatherings across the city.
Some responded by throwing bottles. Most fled.
Police announced the arrests of 24 young people, many on charges related to what officers described as organized vandalism and rioting. They wrote 70 other citations and seized some guns and drugs.
At least one circle of fire had been lit in a parking lot as a visual accent to drivers demonstrating how to burn tires on pavement.
But police say the raucous parties have become dangerous for another reason — as precursors to street racing.
They billed the coordinated raids as an important step taken against a senseless and often lethal pastime that threatens everyone on the road.
Within hours of the sweep, 18 arrested people had their cases dismissed. A county magistrate and other officials called the SAPD charges too imprecisely written to meet the judicial standard of probable cause.
Four of the 24 said to be arrested, it later
turned out, just got ticketed.
That left only two with charges still pending.
Bexar County chief public defender Michael Young, whose attorneys represent indigent clients, including all 18 whose cases were rejected that night, termed the SAPD operation “a massive case of over-charging” for the sake of a zero-tolerance policy.
Police spokesman Jesse Salame rejected any notion that the roundup mainly was a display of force aimed at stunting a growing menace and discouraging casual wannabes from joining it.
“We were not just trying to throw a bunch of people in jail to send amessage,” he said. “These people are trying to disrupt the peace and tranquility of the public, then put their exploits on social media. We won’t be deterred by these dismissals.”
From bad to worse
On weekend nights on the South Side, groups of five or six fast cars fly off Interstate 35 and along the access road, sometimes turning west to gather and race on Theo Avenue, said a convenience store manager in the area who asked that she not be identified for safety reasons.
“They’ve become more belligerent, more dangerous,” she said. “The people on this street hate them.”
A decades-old San Antonio tradition of weekend “car meets,” the parking lot preening where owners show off their high-powered and lavishly detailed automobiles, has been corrupted, police say, by a younger, more confrontational crowd.
It’s very different from the oldschool culture. Young men gun their cars to speeds over 100 mph, often on long straight corridors such as Military Drive, Bandera and Culebra roads and sometimes on freeways. They weave through traffic, terrifying other drivers. They slam their brakes into controlled slides. They shut down intersections.
“It’s understating the problem to simply call this drag racing,” Police Chief William McManus said. “Some people may have started their evening at a car meet, but it turned into blocking streets, starting fires, assaulting police and creating havoc around the city.”
If it were contained to parking lots, police and fed-up residents might just dismiss it all as a generational nuisance, an almost anachronistic rite of passage most thought already had lost the entertainment battle to Netflix and video games.
But veteran car meet aficionados — mostly Latino men from 30 to 60 years old — are irritated that their law-abiding pastime on the South and West Sides has been tainted by a wave of collisions and arrests.
On car clubwebsites and Facebook pages, they’ve pointedly
distanced themselves from the reckless and destructive tone of the younger cohort.
Levi Lewis, president and founder of one such club, Alamo City LX Modern Mopar, said the element causing problems “is really just ruining it for everybody.”
They are mostly young and either lack respect for others and fear no consequences, he said, or underestimate the consequences, thinking they only will receive a ticket.
The racing itself always has been dangerous. This summer saw a spike of examples.
On July17 at 4 a.m., two drivers crashed into utility poles and parked vehicles, then a house, on Ferndale Street and Division Avenue on the Southwest Side, in what police said was the possible aftermath of a race.
The same month, a racer lost control of his vehicle on Loop 410 near the Poteet Jourdanton Freeway, hitting two utility poles, police said. Two women escaped before the car caught fire. The trapped driver’s lifewas saved by a passing trucker who extinguished it.
In June, a three-car street racing collision in the 8100 block of McCullough on the North Side killed two people and sent five others to the hospital in critical condition.
The response has been what SAPD called its “street racing initiative” and the Oct. 26 enforcement sweep.
The vandalism that night was evident to Michelle Coben, the owner of the San Antonio Event Center near Marbach Road at Loop 410, one of the gathering places. Her glass front door was smashed.
“Especially now, during the pandemic, can’t we just be a community?” Coben asked. “Can’t we just be kind to one another?”
Other targeted locations included Roosevelt Avenue at Military Drive, U.S. 281 at Basse Road, Texas 151 at Callaghan Drive and Ingram Road at Loop 410.
Police also arrested partiers in the parking lot of a charter school — the Bexar County Academy at Hillcrest Avenue at Bandera Road — and chased others as they fled.
Some of those arrested might have met up through tweets and texts. The police suggest some came with the specific intent of damaging property, assaulting police and endangering lives, including their own, for the thrill of it.
“Just a year ago, it was unheard of” for car meet participants to confront police, SAPD spokesman Sgt. Matt Brown said. “But now they are more aggressive and it’s become very dangerous at some of those locations.”
He suggested “the current climate” might be stoking the anger, alluding to a summer of nationwide demonstrations against police violence amid calls for law enforcement and judicial reforms.
Charges rejected
In the weeks since the raid, McManus and Salame said detectives have been interviewing witnesses with the intention of refiling several of the dismissed cases.
McManus acknowledged group arrests can be “problematic” and said he wished the department didn’t have to “dedicate resources that could be put to better use in our neighborhoods.”
The department gave the roundup a single case number and released that report, which described only two of the arrested people and activity at three sites. It deemed the others nonpublic “supplemental reports” and declined to release them.
The report thatwas made public described a tactical plan to surround the gatherings as officers became aware of them and arrest all who were there. It identified a 19-year-old Dallas resident as an organizer.
Booked on a charge of riot participation and released on $12,000 bond, he became one of the two defendants whose charge was not dismissed that night.
County officials say the charging paperworkwas a problem for most cases, with specifics of arrested people’s alleged acts not spelled out.
Magistrate Marilisa Janssen, who along with Magistrate Rose Zebell-Sosa processed the charges that night, said she had to reject nearly all of the 18 cases she handled.
“I don’twant to get into details because some of these cases might be refiled, but in some of them there justwasn’t enough information,” Janssen said.
“The details do truly matter,” she said.“We don’t treat these arrests differently because they may have been part of a group. Every case is on the same footing.”
Young, the public defender, said it was unprecedented for so many related cases to be dismissed for lack of probable cause and that among his staff that night a note went out saying, “Be prepared for a bunch of subpar riot charges.”
Another problem with the arrests and others in a city that books about 60,000 people into jail each year, said Janssen, was that the suspects were processed after midnight and often the arresting officer was not present to explain the circumstances.
Several of the suspects had multiple minor charges filed against them that Young said typically are used as leverage to get a guilty plea to some other offense.
Bad night out
The only other charges not dismissed by magistrates that night began with two cousins meeting up, they said, to visit a more grown-up world they had known about for years through their families.
Abcedy Hernandez Alvarez, 18, and Amanda Rose Perez, 19, who both live with Alvarez’s grandmother off Culebra Road on theWest Side, came to the car meet outside the charter school on Hillcrest about 9:30 p.m. to find it already had drawn more than 200 people.
“Fancy rims, loud music, nice cars,” Perez said. “Yeah, there might have been some hot guys, but for us it wasn’t any kind of dating thing. … It would be rare for us to even get out of our vehicles. We just enjoyed ourselves. My stepmom is in a car club, so I’ve seen them, but that was the first I had participated in.”
Perez, who said she worked as a phlebotomist at a local blood lab, was driving her 2004 Nissan Altima, with a newly painted black trunk, new rims and tires and a throbbing sound system.
In the back seat were some minor children related to the two women.
“Everyone treated everyone like family that night,” said Alvarez, a hairstylist. “I saw older people there, babies… I stayed in the car. I was cold. I’m not really a talkative person.”
The women say that about 11 p.m., they sawthe lights of police vehicles “hauling really fast” up Bandera Road. They didn’t want to explain themselves to police and decided, “It’s time to go home,” Alvarez said.
“So we drove onto Hillcrest (exiting the parking lot) and that’s when the cops cut us off,” she said. “Iwas having an anxiety attack. I had never been arrested before. I’m a mom and I was scared.”
The two women say the police vehicle seemed to deliberately swerve into their lane of traffic on Hillcrest and rammed the Nissan. The police report, briefly mentioning the incident, says the Nissan hit the SAPD vehicle.
As she stepped out of the passenger side door, “an officer grabbedme with both hands and yanked me out of the car,” Alvarez said.
She said one officer with a name tag that said “M. Williams” knocked the glasses off her face by striking her with an open hand.
Brown said the department does not have an “M. Williams” on the force. He encouraged Alvarez to file an internal affairs complaint if she believes an officer used excessive force. Salame said the entire incident is being investigated.
The SAPD would not provide any of the officers involved in the Oct. 26 sweep to be interviewed.
Alvarez was charged with the class B misdemeanor of “riot engagement,” but her case was among those rejected by magistrates. She was released to her grandmother at 6:03 a.m.
Perez, who was driving, was charged with three misdemeanors — riot engagement, possession of marijuana under 2 ounces, and criminal mischief — plus a felony, endangering a child, because there was at least one minor
in the car, according to SAPD.
Those charges still are pending. Perez was released on bond some hours after her cousin.
Old school
The recent arrests have accentuated a long-simmering rift between younger street racers and the older car meet culture.
Lewis, the club president, said Alamo City LX does not condone street racing, reckless driving, tire “burnouts,” obscene behavior or excessive speed while traveling in a caravan group. These are grounds for expulsion.
The club grew from Lewis’ linking up with other enthusiasts in 2006 when he purchased his Dodge Charger and logged onto internet forums to learn more about his classic sports car. It now hosts a benefit each year for Arms of Hope, a Christian care organization that assists children and single-mother families in need.
People who are passionate about their cars might be unaffiliated with a club, and that’s OK, Lewis said.
“Those folks usually attend cars and coffees, car shows, meetups, and they’re usually just part of a good scene thatwants to share the fellowship,” he said. But the tension is inescapable. On Facebook, one mainstream organization, San Antonio Car Meets, with some 24,000 members, prominently displays this notice: “Posts related to local street racing are not allowed. Do not post call-outs, shout-outs (for street racing), or any type of post looking for the person you raced on the local roads.”
The opposite code prevails on a Facebook page called “San Antonio car meets (No rules)” — which has changed its name six times since 2018, twice opting for “(Some Rules).”
“This is the Original SACM dont get lost into the haters from the other pagewhere they turn in your plates to the local Police Department. this is a place for Car meets where revving & burnouts are greatly encouraged!”
The group highly recommends racing, it continued, and “if you have beef with someone then we might as well make a meet so yall can settle it no one gets kick off here.”
Like others, Lewis believes social media can bring out the worst tendencies of drivers who want to become “instafamous.”
“All it takes is some social media person who has blown up on whatever channel getting thousands of likes for someone to say. ‘Well, I can do better than him’ and it becomes a perpetual cycle at that point,” Lewis said.
It’s a nationwide problem, he said, adding, “We’re seeing the tip of that element bubbling up and it’s happening in front of everybody.”