Brentwood Police Chief Comments on Recent Sideshow Activity

During Tuesdays Brentwood City Council meeting, Brentwood Police Chief Tim Herbert issued a report on the recent sideshow activity with gunshots fired on Sand Creek Road near the bypass.

On December 4 at 2:30 am, police responded to Sand Creek at Highway 4 Bypass after multiple callers reported sideshow activity along with gunshots being fired as drivers recklessly took over the intersection. No arrests, citations, or injuries were reported.

Here are Chief Herbert’s comments during the council meeting:

Chief Tim Herbert

“As you know we had a fairly large sideshow event on December 4 at about 2:30 am. To put this in perspective this was a well coordinated sideshow event that was two-days which started Friday and ended on Saturday.

The group called this the Cup Event in honor of the World Cup. Friday night they hit San Francisco, Oakland and Tracy.

On Saturday night, they came over to this part of the county, starting in Pittsburg and moved their way through Antioch. They tried to form a sideshow on Lone Tree Way where we were able to disperse them before they formed. They then moved back to Pittsburg and then later established a sideshow at Sand Creek and the bypass.

These events are very disturbing to our community, I understand that, but when we have a 100 plus vehicles with people discharging firearms into the air, four police officers and one sergeant to handle it, its not safe for the officers and not safe to the community as a whole.

Once we had requested mutual aid from neighboring agencies, we were only able to get four Contra Costa County Sheriffs deputies and one CHP officer to assist with us, once that group did show up. It gave us more numbers to push them into a direction where they finally decided to breakup and leave.

In the past when we have tried to break up all these events with smaller number of officers, we receive push-back via frozen water bottles, rocks thrown at patrol cars, we have had an officer injured. So its delicate balance between public safety and officer safety when we deal with these events.

Again, these groups are very well coordinated, they run counter surveillance with drones, they send out scouter cars into the community to see where they are going to setup next. So regional our best effort for agencies our size and this part of the county is to prevent them before they form. Once they form it’s a little more difficult to deal with until we get officers on scene.

We are having a meeting, a regional wide meeting, on how to address this as law enforcement going forward. Again, our best effort is to prevent them. We have a well connected open source media where our regional partners are on a email chain where one can alert others if one is forming in our area to let everyone know this is occurring and we do our best to have extra staff on during these events.

But again, this is concerning to the community and we do our best but there is a delicate balance between public safety and the safety of the officers. Last thing we want is an unintended consequence of a citizen get hit by a fleeing vehicle who is trying to prevent getting arrested and their vehicle towed.

As far as citations, there were no citations and no vehicle towed. There are investigative efforts we are working on and there are laws that help us on the back-end post event hat will assist in getting some of these participants vehicles towed after the fact. But again, they are taking counter efforts from preventing us from even doing that. We are working with our regional partners in preventing this from happening.”

Mayor Joel Bryant called the sideshow event “upsetting for everyone” but called this is a regional issue. He said in the future they have preventative measures in the works.

Anyone with information is encouraged to contact our agency at 925-809-7911. You may also visit the Brentwood Police Department website.