Rachel Swan

On a crisp night in February, a caravan of cars and trucks tore through San Jose, following a cryptic set of directions posted on Instagram, police said.

The participants stopped at the corner of Hamilton and Leigh avenues and formed a circle around the intersection. In the center — an area that police call “the pit” — drivers took turns spinning doughnuts and figure eights, tires squealing on the asphalt.

Spectators fired guns as smoke from burnt rubber fogged the air, the cars careening in every direction. When police swept the area the next morning — Feb. 14 — they picked up 100 shell casings.

It was one of five sideshows that took place in San Jose that night, all corresponding to addresses posted by a single Instagram handle. In San Jose and cities across the Bay Area, the trend had such volcanic intensity that authorities were confounded, unsure whether to hand out citations, or put barriers in roads, or muzzle the organizers on social media.

“During the pandemic it really became a much bigger issue,” San Jose Council Member Dev Davis said of these improvised car stunt demonstrations, a longstanding Bay Area tradition that grew out of old-school cruising culture, but has been remolded by the internet.

These spectacles may have been cathartic for teenagers cooped up during the pandemic, Davis ventured, but for neighborhoods and law enforcement, they are a burden. Most police departments lack the resources to contain sideshows, let alone track down license plates and link them to drivers, making prosecutions both rare and challenging.

While Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law this month allowing a six-month driver’s license suspension for people convicted of street racing, cities are enacting a dizzying array of policies and ordinances of their own.

As sideshows exploded, political leaders struggled to balance demands from angry residents, police weary of playing cat-and-mouse with crowds that scatter quickly and advocates who object to heavy enforcement, or who view sideshows as a noteworthy cultural scene.

Overwhelmingly, cities are taking a hard line.

“The message has been ‘Stay out of San Jose,’” City Council Member Maya Esparza said. She has sponsored two ordinances, in 2019 and this year, to discourage sideshows and street racing.

Richmond police Officer Ben Therriault investigates tire tracks behind a new barrier placed at an industrial park frequented by sideshow participants. The city reported 122 sideshows last year and 82 so far this year.

Richmond police Officer Ben Therriault investigates tire tracks behind a new barrier placed at an industrial park frequented by sideshow participants. The city reported 122 sideshows last year and 82 so far this year.

From May 2020 through February this year, San Jose police fielded about 460 calls for service related to these events, according to police statistics compiled Esparza’s office. This year, Oakland’s police dispatch received 960 such calls.

Richmond police reported 122 sideshows last year and 82 so far this year, while the San Francisco Police Department’s stunt-driving response unit logged 41 vehicle citations, 37 towed cars and 16 30-day holds through the end of last month, with 21 active cases pending more information or a judge’s signature. All but three of those motorists hailed from outside the city.

“It’s large groups of individuals from outside coming here,” said San Francisco’s acting deputy police chief, Daniel Perea, noting that cars swarm in from as far away as Los Angeles and bounce from city to city, forcing leaders to treat sideshows as a regional issue. Perea said he doesn’t know what is fueling this year’s increase but that the persistent warm weather could be a factor.

In Oakland, residents and politicians urged Newsom to send in the California Highway Patrol, largely to help manage sideshows and other dangerous driving.

Kathleen Heafey, a resident of the Sequoyah Hills neighborhood above Interstate 580, described convoys of 30 to 40 cars that would blast up from the freeway, blowing through stop signs until they reached the intersection of Skyline Boulevard and Keller Avenue. From January through the end of September, police reported 31 sideshows on that patch of road.

“You could hear the gun activity,” Heafey said. “There were always (shell) casings in the intersection.”

During the summer, the city came up with a deterrent: posts and bumps to narrow the road. Since they went up, the nights have been quieter, Heafey said.

San Jose began ratcheting up its sideshow enforcement in 2019, with an ordinance that made it illegal to watch a sideshow. Spectators could face misdemeanor charges with fines of up to $1,000 or six months in jail, an idea that Fairfield replicated this month, and that some city leaders are contemplating in Richmond. In June, San Jose began targeting sideshow organizers, with a new ordinance that made it illegal to promote them online.

The law passed its first test on Sept. 30, when a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge granted the city’s request for a preliminary injunction against four defendants accused of advertising sideshows on Instagram.

An attorney for one of the defendants viewed the injunctions as trampling on free speech and the right to association.

“It’s overbroad,” attorney Timothy Burke said, contending that the city had scant evidence against his client, Luis Felipe Garcia, whom police said posted at least one promotional video for a gathering on West Capitol Expressway, under the Instagram handle “SJBoss.”

When officers arrived, they found at least 100 cars and Garcia wearing an “SJBoss” T-shirt. He admitted the shirt referred to his Instagram account, Sgt. Brian Winco wrote in a court affidavit.

Some cities are supplementing enforcement with softer forms of prevention, largely in the form of road redesign: traffic circles, bumps and bollards that can be put up or taken down quickly. In the Evergreen neighborhood of San Jose, some residents got so desperate that they built their own roundabout in a popular location for street racing. City crews recently tore it down and erected a new one.

Businesses are installing their own barriers. On a recent Saturday night, Richmond officer and police union president Benjamin Therriault drove his patrol vehicle to the end of Canal Boulevard and found a new padlocked gate blocking the waterfront parking lot.

Shining his flashlight, Therriault saw big, looping tire marks on the pavement, a telltale sign that stunt drivers had been there.

But if a new road impediment slows down these drivers, it’s not enough to stop them altogether. So, some people are pressing a bold idea that officials have contemplated for decades, but never seriously pursued: putting sideshows in legal venues.

Sideshow enthusiast Sean Kennedy said he tried to pitch that concept several years ago, as a member of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission, but that he met resistance from political leaders. Richmond City Council Member Eduardo Martinez discussed the possibility of legalizing sideshows during a Council meeting in July, but the concept has apparently not advanced.

Kennedy and another sideshow aficionado, Oakland filmmaker Yakpasua Zazaboi, view sanctioned sideshow events as a potential outlet for drivers with near-acrobatic skills at the wheel, or self-taught mechanics who can build their own high-powered engines.

Both men also remember an era during the 1980s and ’90s in Oakland, when sideshows were more of a performance art, than made-for-YouTube extreme sport. People came to flaunt their old-school Mustangs, Cougars, Cutlasses, or Oakland’s beloved icon, the 1980s box Chevrolet Caprice.

Legitimizing these gatherings could do what the X Games did for skateboarding, Zazaboi said.

“There’s some drivers, it looks like they’re sliding around on ice, and they have total control of the car,” Kennedy said, arguing that if cities were more creative, they could cultivate these drivers’ skills. Instead, he said, “they criminalize it.”

Others doubt that sideshow participants would willingly switch to a legal arena.

“Anything that’s too convenient — I just don’t think it would have the same attractiveness as stopping traffic and seeing people get angry,” Sequoyah Hills Homeowners Association President Sandra Bethune said. “That’s part of the thrill, I think.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan