SP Residents Try to Stop Street Takeovers

Some San Pedro residents are trying to slow down their neighbors — or at the very least, stop people from driving recklessly in their neighborhoods.

At the May 16 meeting of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, the board voted 10-0 to ask that the city place a center median on Paseo Del Mar, in front of Joan Milke Flores Park. The reason for this is to prevent cars from doing street racing and donuts. In addition, the council also asked for a crosswalk to make it easier for pedestrians to walk into the park.

Japhet Hom, captain of the Los Angeles Police Department South Traffic Division, said that what his division sees is not really street racing, but street takeovers.

“Takeovers consist of guys that will block off an intersection or a stretch of highway and do their burnouts and donuts, and people film it,” Hom said. “That’s what we typically get, we don’t get the traditional street racing, like what it used to be, where two cars go down the street and race each other.”

Noel Gould, a board member of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, lives nearby and has witnessed vehicles taking over the street multiple times. Most recently, it was a truck club.

“Not only were they stopping traffic right next to Joan Milke Flores Park, and spinning monstrous donuts, but then all of the cars were parked in one of the lanes of traffic as well,” Gould said. “There was a family with a young child and a dog trying to cross, and they just didn’t know how to handle it.”

James Campeau, a neighborhood activist, brought the idea of a crosswalk in front of Joan Milke Flores Park to the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council’s planning and land use committee.

“It really needs some kind of lined crosswalk,” Campeau said. “A stop sign would be great. But people walking from Pt. Fermin Park, they walk along the sidewalk over to Wilder’s addition … a lot of times they’re jaywalking.”

Campeau pointed out that it’s a destination place and a walking area, and said he wants to link the parks in the area: Angels Gate, Joan Milke Flores, Wilder’s Addition Park and Pt. Fermin.

“When you go westbound, you’re going along Paseo Del Mar, and then you go up kind of this hill,” Campeau said. “It’s kind of blind as you come over. Well, some of these guys are road racing there, and they can’t see if people are jaywalking in Joan Milke Flores Park.”

Paseo Del Mar is a very wide street, and the purpose of a center median would be to make it narrower on both sides, that way donuts are no longer possible.

“This whole sort of donut doing business, it’s something, at least in this area, that’s developed over the last few years,” Gould said. “It wasn’t really so much of a problem before that.”

Gould said that this is popular wherever the road is wide. Lots of skid marks are visible on Paseo Del Mar, and at other such roads, like Pacific Avenue, or at the Gaffey overlook.

At Paseo Del Mar, it happens fairly regularly, Gould said, often on Sunday afternoons.

“We were going for the Paseo motion because that’s a super popular spot,” Gould said.

Gould said the raised median would be about the height of the curb. Inside it, there would be plants native to southern California.

“Not only would it be a median, but it would be an attractive-looking median,” Gould said.

The council sent the motion to several city agencies, including the Department of Transportation, or DOT, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Council District 15 office. However, Gould has no idea how soon the city will respond.

“Watching the city work is like, I don’t know, watching molasses move in the arctic,” Gould said.

Campeau expressed frustrations with DOT.

“I have an idea for intersections,” Campeau said. “But we always have to deal with DOT. And every word out of their mouth is no, until someone gets killed, and then they do something, sometimes.”

Gould said that these vehicular activities are dangerous not just to the people involved, but to bystanders as well.

“They’re doing that right there at Paseo Del Mar, with a cliff, with a 115-foot drop,” Gould said. “What if one of them lost control and went over the cliff?”

However, Gould doesn’t believe that the median will be enough.

“That’s like a band-aid on an arm that’s been chopped off,” Gould said. “It happens all over the place.”

Gould argued that the only way to really stop the takeovers would be for the police to get there early and give tickets to the drivers, and impound their cars.

Hom said sometimes his division is not able to get there in time, so sometimes patrol officers will have to deal with it.

“I only have four guys doing it, basically, in all of south LA,” Hom said.

His department is preoccupied with other things as well, mainly investigating traffic collisions.

“That’s our primary goal, to free up patrol, so they don’t have to do it,” Hom said. “So, patrol can handle patrol related things, dealing with the gangs and the shootings.”

Hom said that the organizers use social media to announce when their next events will happen. Hom and the division are aware of the posts. 

“We try to follow them on social media to see where the meet spots are,” Hom said. “That’s how they communicate with each other. LA is so big, it’s hard to sit at a spot and try to figure out where it’s going to be.”

Once they find out where the takeover will take place, the police try to disrupt or prevent it.

“A lot of these street takeovers, they’re very large,” Hom said. “We get a lot of cars sometimes, and it can easily overwhelm our two or three units. So, we try to get sufficient units to disrupt it. And then if we see violations, we try to make those enforcement stops and basically pick them off one or two at a time.”

Hom said that part of the problem is his division does not have enough personnel, and it is struggling to hire people.

The officers that work for Hom will issue citations to the vehicle owners, and they have been trained to look for modifications to engines and exhaust systems, to give out more specific citations.

“If they observe the violation for anything related to burnout or takeover for exhibition of speed, then those cars get to be impounded as well,” Hom said. “And then eventually, we’ll get a judicial seizure warrant, and seize that car for 30 days.”