Every Saturday night, writes Jalisha Rowen in The Tribe, the student newspaper at Santaluces High School in Lantana, Florida, hundreds of people gather in an empty lot, usually in an industrial section of Palm Beach County, as if encircling a break dancer, documenting on their smartphones a host of souped-up cars doing doughnuts, tires burning tracks into the concrete and spewing smoke into the air, and noise—loud noise.
Jalisha is describing “car meets,” which are not new events, but events whose frequency has increased since the pandemic, the New York Times reported. Many of the spectators—in fact, some car drivers—are teenagers.
Never mind that it’s completely illegal to head to an empty parking lot with cars that have been made louder or even equipped with “straight pipes,” which, given a modification to the car’s computer, cause the exhaust to spit out shots like gunfire. Never mind that drivers often bring alcohol and illicit drugs to the car meets. The point here is the expression of a subculture that has little regard for the safety and peace of other community members.
Often the locations are kept secret until a last-minute WhatsApp post provides the details without giving police too much notice. And then people go to participate or to watch, with some young spectators standing in the lot while cars do doughnuts around them, Jalisha wrote.
The cars are too loud to say neighbors and other community members aren’t bothered by the noise. And the menace is even worse when the stunt drivers do their thing in the middle of city intersections, impeding traffic, which might include emergency vehicles, and terrorizing residents and visitors.
For example, a video recorded a crowd surrounding the driver of a car that spun around and did burnouts at the intersection of Falls Road and 41st Street in north Baltimore in April, WBAL-TV (NBC affiliate) reported.
