About 700 vehicles participated in sideshow activity around East Oakland early Sunday morning, reports the Contra Costa Times. But this wasn't any old sideshow: in the video above, posted by KRON you can hear gunshots (confirmed by California Highway Patrol Officer Sean Wilkenfeld), and hear sirens and screeching tires. At about the 15 second mark of the video, you can see several people jumping up and down on top of police cars.
According to KRON, the CHP said its officers were first dispatched to southbound lanes of Interstate 880, near the High Street offramp around 12:44 a.m. There, they found cars doing donuts on the freeway, and speeding around, and had been entering the freeway's southbound lanes through the offramp by driving in the opposite direction. After police arrived, many of the vehicles left shortly thereafter.
But in another part of town, CHP officials said that an additional sideshow sideshow broke out at the intersection of International Boulevard and 55th Avenue.
Gun shots were heard in a few different spots across town over the course of the sideshows; police cited side-sideshows on Alameda Way, Coliseum Way, 54th Avenue and International Boulevard, 106th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, and 90th and Bancroft avenues. At least one of the shots that was fired was aimed at a helicopter. Officer James Andrews, a CHP helicopter pilot (who wasn't flying at the time) told the Contra Costa Times, "We got the reports, and then made sure that we got that helicopter out of harm's way. It would take either incredible stroke of luck, or bad luck depending on how you look at it, to hit the helicopter in a mechanical spot."
KRON writes that one arrest made around 11:44 p.m. on Saturday night, before the main crux of the action, when police tried to stop a red mustang in Oakland. But the driver didn't stop, and led the police on a chase before surrendering. One police vehicle was vandalized, but other than that, no other damage or injuries have been reported.
Here's another video:
