The handcuffed driver and passenger weren't as fortunate. The crowd scattered like a herd of zebras on an African plain panicked at the sight of a predator. Unfortunately for the guy driving the blue car, the cop had picked him out first and stayed with him during the panic.
"I was just pulling into the driveway, the street," the young driver says. "The cop was right behind us."
Mark Graham
Members of the Dangerous Performance crew stop at Joan's Spot Free Car Wash before a night of racing. Those on the crew who are along for the ride this time horse around in the parking lot.
Mark Graham
Hanging out is a big part of street racing. Drivers wait for more cars to arrive before racing recently, top. Carlos Vanegas looks on as a race gets under way at an industrial park in Arlington.
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After a few minutes, a second police officer arrives to assist the first.
The youth tries to look cocksure and whistles while the police officer checks him and his passenger for outstanding warrants. Sergeant J.D. Pugh acts stern. He talks to the youth as if the whole vanished crowd were there.
"We're not playing games with you guys anymore," he says. "We catch you, we're going to give you all the tickets we can write, and we're going to take you to jail."
A third officer arrives at the strip. And then a fourth. By then, everybody but the youth and his blue car are long gone. Pugh initially thinks the car he stopped might be stolen, but it's not. Pugh issues the driver a ticket for not producing his insurance card.
Once away from the youths, Pugh's hardened face relaxes. Suddenly, he looks friendly. He's part of an anti-drunken driving task force, he says, which is trying to curb street racing. He doesn't come out and say it but implies that he'd rather have these kids racing on that strip than in the streets. The problem, he says, is that the races take shape in a way that is just too dangerous for police to ignore.
"Arlington has not had any killed like that, but other cities have. That's where the danger is. They can lose control. They blow a tire or something like that. They start peeling out and one tire holds and the other tire doesn't, and it turns them to the left or the right into the crowd, and then you have a bunch of dead bodies."
Pugh says police know they aren't going to stop races, but they can cut down on the problem.
"There's no way that we're ever going to catch them all. If they're going to run, they're going to run. You pick a violation and you stop them," he says.
Vanegas and his crew, along with the other racers, head out to another warehouse district. They'll race until about 2 a.m. before police arrive and again scatter the crowd.
At the Rancho on another day, part of the crew sits around a table in the front of the restaurant. Somebody else is in their spot in the backroom. The crew talks warily about the bigger and bigger crowds they seem to be attracting.
"I know that, like, when school gets out for the summer, it's Wednesday night to the races," Patino says. "The thing is, that it's too many people."
Scott Cochran, editor of Drag Racer Magazine in Los Angeles and a street racer himself in the early 1960s, says today's street racers aren't much different from those who started it all.
"Back in the '30s, when the hot rod movement started, the general public complained about the hot rodders, those damn hot rodders, and they had problems with the street racing, so hot rodders got a black eye in society. They were outlaws, so to speak," he says.
He says national hot rod and drag racing associations need to accept the new breed of street racer, and local law enforcement needs to do more to find safer places and safer ways to race.
"It's been going on since 1939 that I know of, and it isn't going to stop, so they've got to develop places for these kids to run," he says. "...It's not going to go away. There's always going to be street racing."
