Street-racing being driven from misdemeanor to felony
John Benoit, Palm
Desert representative to the California State Assembly, is reintroducing an amended version of AB 2190 this year. The
bill addresses illegal street-racing and would increase penalties for street-racers, including a four to ten year
prison sentence if someone is killed by the activity. According to the DMV, street-racing has resulted in more than 40
deaths since 2001, while arrests of street-racers has increased by nine percent since 2004. Reasons why people street-race, states CHP Sergeant Matt Boothe, range from younger drivers possessing 'invincibility complexes' to the availability of low-cost small, high-performance vehicles like modified Acuras.
Other laws in California dealing with the issue allow Los Angeles County police officers to confiscate and destroy such vehicles.
[Source: Whittier Daily News]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Joe 11:44AM (4/15/2006)
So long as they will be consistent in their enforcement, meaning guys like Dietrich would get the same time as someone in a civic, then i have no problems...
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Tom Wilson 11:58AM (4/15/2006)
I am 60 years old and have always had fast cars, still do. Drag strips in this area are 50-60 miles away. We need local police to organize some type of racing on an old abandoned road, park, airport, etc: The area must be available at all times for us kids to run our cars. We don't want to break any laws, but we spend untold hours working on our cars only to have know where to test our work. We must tow our car 60 miles or more just to see if what we did made a difference. There are doctors, lawers, etc: doing this and some local help would eliminate a great deal of street racing. Instead of trying to put us all in jail, why not spend that money we tax payers have to dish out for jail time into a fund for us racers. You will be surprised how many class people are involved, and would be glad to work the area disignated and keep the contests safe and organized. TWW
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Nat 12:01PM (4/15/2006)
Who decides what qualifies as street racing is my question? Seems like it could be very subjective. This is a lot of power to put in the hands of some idiot street cops.
Seems like just another excuse to steal your car and screw up your life if they don't like the way you look.
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narcszm 12:08PM (4/15/2006)
More stringent laws are not the answer. Kids street race because there arent enough legitimate venues to get their race on. Around here, cops hand out free passes to the drags when they pull these chumps over for racing or aggressive driving. They're gonna do it anyway; they just need some guidance on where to do it.
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Ken 12:40PM (4/15/2006)
Problem I have is what is street racing?
Is pulling away from the stop light faster than a mini-van next to you street racing? I am sure some cops would say yes.
Please, for the love of god, WE DO NOT NEED MORE LAWS LIKE THIS!!!
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That One Person 12:54PM (4/15/2006)
Great...more laws. They need to do something else. Build more dragstrips. I am tired of watching idiot kids run up and down my street on crotch rockets and souped up Hondas. It is a 25 MPH zone and they are topping at least 70 up and down here sometimes. Laws arent going to solve this problem. Taking away their vehicles isnt going to solve this problem. Shredding a license isnt going to solve this problem. BUILD A FREAKING TRACK! Give them a place to do it legally and safely. Running between parked cars is far from safe...
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Daniel 1:32PM (4/15/2006)
If you street race, you're breaking the law. It's very simple.
Stop blaming a lack of strips or road courses, you don't NEED to race people.
I'm not Mr. Perfect, I've raced a few people in my cars, but I'm well aware that if I get caught, it's my own damn fault. I've never heard of ANYONE getting in trouble for racing that wasn't actually racing.
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john 2:05PM (4/15/2006)
Just another way to get money from the people and fill up the jails. The lawyers are making everything a felony now days. The next thing you know that will be a felony is placing your chewing gum under a theater seat. Big Brother atwork again.
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Jim 2:09PM (4/15/2006)
Problem be, ya see, is driving anything isn't a Constitutional right and all the do-gooder/save us from ourselves types can run law after law at us until it saves just one life! 'Course, driving like "a-bat-outta-_ _ _ _," anywhere but on some type of race track does put a lot of innocent folk in harms way and probably doesn't do much for the driver's longevity either! I suppose I'm conflicted, on the one hand I agree adding laws on top of enough of them already isn't going to accomplish much. On the other hand, tougher laws might encourage some to refrain from the more reckless venues of street racing - like running from the cops!
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AutoFan 2:13PM (4/15/2006)
Yes, let's build more drag strips. That's the answer. I'm assuming that all of you suggesting this (and your spouses/parents) are perfectly happy living within earshot of one, too. It's not enough just to build one in industrial parks or whatever. The revenue generated from a drag strip won't be sufficient to make it worthwhile to a city. And in Los Angeles (or anywhere else in California), there's a strong enough NIMBY component that the strips HAVE to be out in the boonies.
So, yeah. Build more drag strips. That'll do it.
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John 2:22PM (4/15/2006)
If the drag strips could make money catering to the "I want to be legal while neutral-dropping my Civic" crowd... we'd have dozens of drag strips for legal weekend street/drag all over the place.
But, as it stands, the places that have tried to give these hot-rodders a place to street/drag are usually shut down due to lack of interest and money, gang fights on their property, etc.
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Kwyjibo 2:27PM (4/15/2006)
Argh....more lameness. Aren't there other, more important problems to worry about as a law maker?
This law would screw alot of poeple. My buddy was on the fwy once, trying to get to traffic court to pay his ticket on his lunch break, and he got pulled over for speeding. The kicker is that the cop thought he was racing some guy in a Civic. He was in an E46 M3....so you see how subjectivness can just screw this system up.
They really do need to setup venues where kids/adults can go race and not get bothered with fix it tickets, etc.
For alot of people cars are a way of life. They must race, it's in their blood.
Out here in Los Angeles they should use airports...i.e. Van Nuys Airport or Whitman Airport. Just use a runway or two with a mobile timing system. Have an ambulance there stading buy, and i'm sure you can find one car nut or two; or even a proactive adult who lost someone to illegal street racing to organize and run the event.
No matter how illegal you make it, you are still gonna have poeple racing. It's just a fact of life. Our prisons are already overcrowded enough....these lawmakers need to think 'outside the box'
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AutoFan 2:55PM (4/15/2006)
Kwyjibo:
Using airports is all fine and good, until the airport suddenly needs the extra capacity to, y'know, land planes and stuff. There used to be a strip down in the LA Harbor...forget the name...but it was on an unused Hyundai offloading area. It was convenient, but the track sucked...downhill, pockmarked, very little runoff area, etc. It wasn't safe, really. But it got business until accidents started happening, and finally Hyundai needed the space again because it was suddenly selling more cars.
I love driving fast, but I'm also a realist and know that just building more drag strips is an idealistic and unworkable solution in the real world.
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Jason Chan 3:42PM (4/15/2006)
i really doubt laws or more drag strips will make a difference. People street race cuz its more fun, theres a sense of danger to it. a sense of pride. theres more fun in breaking laws. also theres gambling involved. i doubt that rampant gambling in these street racing circles will be acceptable for a sanctioned race on a track with big brother watching.
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Aki 4:15PM (4/15/2006)
The problem with the law is not that I like street racing, it's that the idiot lawmakers don't take time to see that "street racing" is awfully subjective.
If a cop cites a felony "street racing" charge to you because you're going 73mph in a 65mph and claims you're racing, how would you disprove that? Laws cannot operate on "common sense" since cops don't think about common sense when they have quotas to fulfill.
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Christian J 4:49PM (4/15/2006)
Cops are arseholes, simple as that. It'd suck if they get a charge like this to stick if you were just -'exceeding the posted speed limit'. Yeah its against the law. But make sure you cite the right law. Or is this even the right law to have? Look how many lives ruined by the laws regarding simple possession of marijuana back in the 80s-90s. 1 weed joint=hard time. Nice, Reagan America.
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Justin 6:37PM (4/15/2006)
To each and every one of you who thinks that this problem is due to lack of tracks, how many of you have seen what happens when street racing goes bad? How many of you have been working the trauma unit when the homecoming queen comes in burned to death, with her friend almost dead because of street racing? What do you say to her family? Sorry, but if there was a track, this wouldn't have happened. I suggest you blame the government.
If the criteria are good (ie photo evidence, minimum speeds, etc) of street racing, I fully support making it a felony. Anything to make the streets safer.
Yes, tracks would be safer, but people die on tracks too. State governments would be stupid to sanction deadly events. It would take just one suit happy lawyer to shut it down.
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College Student 7:43PM (4/15/2006)
The lawyers are making everything a felony now days. The next thing you know that will be a felony is placing your chewing gum under a theater seat. Big Brother atwork again.
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Richard Warren 7:53PM (4/15/2006)
All fine guys, UNTIL one of your family or yourself is injured or killed.
And before you start, I raced when I was younger too, we used Maintenance Road near the LA International airprot, and went for it on Hawthorne.
It's like drunk driving and someone gets killed, sorry it's murder, the weapon was a car and the driver was not "impaired" he was drunk and could have stopped before he ever got there. Same for racing.
Sorry, kill or injure someone racing or drunk, murder and you do the time and pay the price.
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stan 8:07PM (4/15/2006)
I have moped's and am big into the performance scene. Although they will only max out at about 40 mph i have heard of people getting street racing fines while driving these wicked fast and dangerous machines. It really goes to show how subjective of a crime this is. Are you really racing if you can't exceed the speed limit?
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