Drivers are fast and Tucson's furious

With the recent death of 3-year-old Anna Garcia in a street racing crash, Tucsonans are rallying for stricter laws and harsh crackdowns around street racing and takeovers.

"The consequences of street racing are not strong enough to stop it, especially for young drivers and repeat offenders," said Emmanuel Garcia, the father of Anna Garcia, at a city council meeting earlier this month. "If the risk does not outweigh the reward, it continues ... and it is continuing."

The Garcia family is pushing for "Anna's Law" in an online petition calling for street racing to become a felony if it results in death or injury, with mandatory prison time upon conviction. The petition had 23,785 signatures as of midweek.

"I've been to several community meetings where now they want to talk about street racing. The community is upset," said Lieutenant Rudy Dominguez. Dominguez has been with the Tucson Police Department for 19 years, but was moved to working on emergency management and homeland security efforts earlier this year, where he now oversees street racing and takeover investigations.

Street racing and takeovers have been a problem across Tucson since 2020, according to Dominguez. He said the problem was exacerbated through 2022 by COVID-19 and social media.

"A lot of people were at home doing whatever, they weren't going to work," he said. "And then social media really helped propel that, where they could organize quick takeovers really, really fast. Faster than we could respond to them and deploy."

Street racing is the illegal competition of speed between vehicles on public roads, and a street takeover is the coordinated blocking of intersections or roads for dangerous stunt driving, including donuts or drifting.

Dominguez said the police department's initial response to the phenomenon was reactive, sending officers into congregations and breaking them up. "It was very resource intensive," he said. "If people stopped for us, we'd issue them the appropriate citation if we had probably cause for it, and if they fled, we just would let them go and get as much information on the vehicle as possible."

TPD is now taking an intelligence-based approach, the lieutenant said, gathering 88-crime tips, talking to business owners in the community after nearby incidents have occurred, monitoring social media platforms and working with Pima County Sheriff's Department and other police departments across southern Arizona.

"We have seen a decrease in deployment to the actual street takeovers," he said. "I think each agency sharing intel with each other has led to a big success for us."

Dominguez said in his own research, he's found Suffolk County in New York to be one of the most successful police departments in street racing because of their intelligence gathering strategies, which are similar to TPD's. The main difference, however, is that Suffolk has a dedicated street racing and takeover task force, something TPD and other local agencies are looking towards.

Launched in November 2024, the Suffolk County Police Department Street Takeover Task Force is a proactive unit established to combat illegal street racing, reckless driving and chaotic car meets. It uses specialized intelligence to intercept events, resulting in 93 takeovers broken up, 70 arrests and 113 impounded vehicles.

The task force, comprising of officers trained in vehicular enforcement, uses social media and intelligence to anticipate and disrupt events. They deploy undercover officers in covert cars and have received support from the local legislature to toughen penalties and confiscate vehicles.

"We're a large county geographically of about a million and a half people, so it created some problems because of the geography and space available to really police these things effectively," said Suffolk County Commissioner Kevin Catalina. "We were kind of chasing our tail with this thing. They'd have a street takeover, we send uniformed cops out there, we chase them away. They'd do it somewhere else, we chase them away. (Then) they'd do it somewhere else."

It didn't take long to put the task force together, and for it to be fully functional, Catalina said, because the officers assigned to it were already trained to handle vehicular enforcement.

"We drilled for street takeovers and we practiced a lot of it. We also recruited our partners in state police and the local sheriff's office to assist us with it," Catalina said.

Suffolk's task force uses similar intelligence-based strategies to TPD, including social media monitoring, intelligence sharing with other New York stations, crime tracking and video monitoring. The effectiveness, however, would not be nearly as high in Suffolk without the task force, according to Catalina.

"You can task police officers with doing this job, but unless you have the training and people that are devoted and dedicated to this type of enforcement, I don't think you're going to be as successful," the commissioner said. "I think we really needed the specialized unit ... You're not going to send a patrol cop out to do narcotics enforcement, right? You need specialty training and understanding strategically of how to approach one of those events."

While TPD does not have a specialized unit for street racing, it is a strategy the department is looking at.

"We have talked to Phoenix and other Valley agencies, and they've talked about combining forces and maybe starting a task force here in Arizona," Lieutenant Dominguez said.

Dominguez is not the only person looking towards other cities for solutions. At May 5's city council meeting, Mayor Romero said she too was looking at other cities around the U.S. that had similar issues to see what the city's government side could do.

"What we in my office started looking at is what other cities are doing nationwide and what can we as a City of Tucson implement and add to the ordinance that the mayor and council passed on this," Romero said, referencing a 2017 ordinance allowing police to immediately impound vehicles involved in illegal street racing. 

Romero listed Chicago, Philadelphia and Louisville as cities Tucson can look towards. In Chicago, street racers can face public nuisance and mob action charges, in Philadelphia, first-time offenders can be fined $2,000, and in Louisville, vehicles can be impounded for up to six months.

Louisville, Kentucky, has an estimated population of 645,000. Similar to Tucson, the city saw an uptick in street racing and intersection exhibitions during the COVID pandemic.

"Every weekend and sometimes during the week, we had these intersections in Louisville being taken over by people doing donuts, and they would last for hours and create traffic jams and gridlock. They were closing streets down with other vehicles, just so they could do these exhibitions," said Louisville Metro Police Department spokesperson Sergeant Matthew Sanders. "The traffic was so bad that officers couldn't even get to the intersections to do any type of enforcement."

In 2022, the city enacted an ordinance allowing police to seize vehicles for up to six months for first-time offenses and impose a $1,000 fine.

"Now this ordinance is a civil penalty, not criminal. So what officers began to do in 2022 was enforce the criminal side of it, whether it's endangerment, reckless driving, driving on a suspended license or whatever, and then we would also cite people under the ordinance, and it allowed us to seize their vehicle," Sanders said.

Because of the ordinance, LMPD was able to seize 62 vehicles in 2023 and 70 in 2024. This number was cut in half to 35 in 2025.

"It doesn't happen here anymore. Very rarely, every now and then, we have a takeover. We seized five cars under the ordinance this past weekend, and as the weather heats up and schools letting out for summer, we anticipate that it's going to happen," Sanders said. "But we're using technology to capture people. We may not get you that night, but we're using drone technology, we're using flock, we're using license plate readers and we're using our helicopter. We're using everything that we can to seize these cars."

The ordinance took about a year to go from idea to law, according to Sanders, to ensure the legal standing of seizing property from street racing and takeover participants, viewers and promoters on social media.

As of now, the City of Tucson classifies illegal racing, speed contests and exhibition of speed as class 1 misdemeanors. Tucson Police target these activities with 30-day vehicle impoundment, alongside arrests for drivers and participants.

The City Council is, however, actively discussing further strengthening their own ordinances. The council also discussed potentially adding a ballot initiative to re-legalize red-light cameras, which remain prohibited due to a 2015 voter ban. Under Tucson Code Section 20-2, law enforcement cannot use evidence gathered through automatic photo cameras.