San Diego has had it with illegal teenage races. Rene Sanchez reports on the Californian city's innovative answer to the problem.
Cars and girls. What more does Alex Akins need? It's a chilly Friday night outside Qualcomm Stadium, and the air is thick with smoke from rumbling engines and the smell of burning rubber.
Akins and a few friends from his high school auto shop class are walking across a vast parking lot that is pulsating with hundreds of hyped teenagers lining a makeshift track in hooded sweatshirts and baggy jeans. Helmets in hand, they have come to race a Camaro they call Big Red all night, against all takers, for reasons they can't easily explain.
"I guess it's - what's that word? - a testosterone thing," Akins said. "The need to go fast in cars has been around since cars were invented. You can't stop that."
Like few other cities, San Diego is taking that old truth to heart. The stadium parking lot has become the stage for an unusual weekly experiment in public policy. The city has decided it can't wipe out the habit that teenagers and young adults have long had of letting their engines rip in illegal street races. So, it's urging - and threatening - them to take up the pastime here.
Okay, so maybe the setting lacks the illicit thrill of a no-rules duel on a desolate back road. The two tracks here stretch for only a quarter-mile, the cops are always watching and nobody can hit the gas without helmet and seat belt.
San Diego gave the legal races another boost this month: It extended the hours of the Friday night competition to 1am. Police had been clearing the lot at 11pm, which gave some late-night racers one more reason to take their chances on the streets.
The races begin around sunset on side-by-side tracks on an edge of the parking lot, beneath a giant yellow Ikea sign glowing from a neighbouring mall. A night of high-speed showdowns costs each racer $15. They wheel into the sprawling lot for hours, cranking stereos and revving engines and sitting on hoods until they take their place in long lines and creep up to the tracks for split-second moments of glory or defeat.
Officials do safety checks on every vehicle before turning it loose to race. They say wrecks and injuries rarely occur. But an ambulance is parked in the lot, just in case. Spectators are kept behind waist-high concrete barricades about 20 yards away, close enough to feel the deafening shudder and roar of the cars screeching down the tracks.
Bigger crowds are turning out every weekend. Racers and spectators alike say they hardly have much choice anymore, because San Diego's political leaders and police department have begun cracking down on street racing.
Last year 15 people were killed in and around San Diego in accidents linked to street racing. Some victims were riding in vehicles that simply came upon a street race at the wrong time and were smashed by racers travelling at high speeds.
The city has had enough. In a unanimous vote, city council members recently approved a law making even watching an illegal street race a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine or six months in jail. Police are impounding racers' vehicles and suspending driving licences for months.
And, for the first time, local prosecutors have filed murder charges against a street racer whose reckless driving killed two teenagers.
States from Oregon to Florida have also been toughening penalties for illegal street racing, whose popularity among teenagers has greatly increased in the past few years, bringing a rash of fatal crashes.
"Everybody's freaking out by what the police are doing," said Patrick Tillman, a college freshman. "We used to go to the other races sometimes, but now you could just be standing there, watching, and the next thing you know a cop is knocking on your door the next morning."
Sergeant Greg Sloan, who leads the undercover unit, said that in past years police tried to scare off drag racers by occasions raids. But this curbed the problem only for a few weeks, he said.
Now, racers never know whether undercover officers are lurking in a crowd - and the price of getting caught is much higher.
"This problem had escalated to the point that it was completely out of control," Sloan said. "We still have more work to do, but we know we have many of them worried now about going to illegal races."