Sideshows and idiocy

The mayor of Oakland has a blog. Kind of a new, techie, hip thing for a mayor to do, and an interesting form of feedback. The particular link that I have is the link to his piece on 'sideshows'. From what I've been able to gather on these events, they are drunken, drug-induced wreckless driving stunts pulled on the streets of Oakland. It happens in bad neighborhoods, around 1:30am on weekends, and involves cars racing at high speed to an intersection where they block all traffic and proceed to pull doughnuts, have people dancing on hoods of cars, etc. It's a huge mess. The crowds that gather are usually high/drunk, and can be very dangerous. These idiots assault people who happen upon the 'sideshow'. There's two things that kill me about this: 1. The comments put out by the people on the Mayor's blog site are idiotic to say the least 2. The Oakland police haven't figured out a way to do anything about it, and sideshows started somewhere between 1985 and 1988. C'mon, that's ridiculous.

To show how stupid the Kalifornia justice system is, they are now confiscating vehicles for 30 days from sideshows. Well, that's fine and dandy if the driver owns the car, but most of these cars are stolen. Now they're talking about auctioning the cars confiscated from sideshows off. Oh, good, so now that your car was stolen, you can have the police sell it as a way to make money to ineptly chase these sideshows off your already crime-ridden streets that you are forced to live on because you make little to no money in an incredibly high cost of living area.

Here's my suggestion: arrest these drivers for wreckless driving. Hmm. Not hard, eh? If they're all drunk and or stoned, how about taking away their license, and pushing a DUI on them, too? There's no reason that you can't just start putting people in jail for this. Yeah, it won't keep others from doing it, but eventually, once everyone's in jail, they won't be driving like idiots anymore. Yes, it will crowd prisons, but aren't these the kind of people we want locked up?

Some of the comments on the mayor's blog are things like 'bring in the national guard and tanks.' That's a good idea. How about we just arm the citizens of the neighborhood and tell them to start shooting at the sideshows as they happen? That'd be a great way to start a full-scale gang war against the citizens or the police. People are idiots.