Long Island street takeovers: Social media turbocharges age-old rebellion

Car guy John Sganga, of South Setauket, was in his driveway the other week washing his hot rod — just like the Chevrolet Camaro SS he had as a kid on Long Island. He was reminiscing about his youth "racing everybody" on Deer Park Avenue, stoplight to stoplight.

"When we used to do it, when we used to race around, you know, were we a little reckless? Yes, we were a little reckless, but we always had that fear that if we really screwed up, we were going to get" — um, disciplined — "by our parents," Sganga said.

And as a teenager, his driver's license was suspended after he racked up three speeding tickets in 18 months across Suffolk.

Sganga is now 47 and a retired police and correction officer who runs a heavy truck and equipment company. And while he relished his own glory days of racing, he said, today's kids are "out of control."

Long Island has had illegal street racing and car culture for generations. But social media has transformed a relatively contained subculture into fast-forming spectacles designed for an audience, sometimes hundreds of people in person and potentially millions online.

Teens and youths in their early 20s are bedeviling police departments and annoying neighborhoods with street takeovers that sometimes descend into chaos if not outright violence.

Trending young

Last month, the Nassau County Police Department — dispatching units that typically execute the most dangerous tasks, gather criminal intelligence and deploy canines — dispersed a "disorderly car meetup" around 10 p.m. of about 150 vehicles in Uniondale: about 100 traffic tickets were issued, 22 vehicles were impounded, and at least five people, ranging from ages 16 to 20, were arrested.

Days earlier, seven vehicles were impounded and 15 people were charged after a street takeover before 1 a.m. in Medford. The Suffolk police Takeover Task Force had been monitoring social media and tracked down participants "driving recklessly, performing stunts in the roadway, and doing donuts and burnouts," according to a police news release.

There also have been takeovers this summer in Hauppauge involving more than 200 ATVs, dirt bikes and motorcycles; in East Farmingdale for an illegal street race event; and in Islip, where cars were crashed, one catching fire, as dozens tried to flee the police responding to an illegal street racing event involving nearly 100 vehicles blocking roadways.

In Suffolk alone, since November 2024, when its police department's Takeover Task Force began, at least 122 takeovers have been dispersed, 13,002 summonses issued, 105 arrests made and 154 vehicles impounded.

For Elliot Herrero, 24, of Massapequa, the street takeovers are "kind of like a party that gathers the community."

Although only a spectator, Herrero said, he has seen his fair share in recent years, including one in Garden City, where the police were called.

He described himself as someone who "grew up on ‘Fast & Furious,’ ” the megahit film franchise that glorifies illegal street racing. When Herrero sees muscle car drivers doing doughnuts at a takeover, he gets "hyped. But also, at the same time, it has to be controlled and chilled out."

Social media stardom

Youths always have pushed boundaries and challenged authority; some have done so long via a robust underground street-racing scene. But experts said the internet and the prospect of social-media stardom have upped the ante.

Enter the street takeover, in which a viral post on TikTok, Instagram or other social media platform draws participants to often unwelcoming neighborhoods, where tomfoolery and criminality mix. Participants one-up one another, competing not just among themselves and local legend but with seemingly the entire internet for something that could go viral.

"In every community, there are things like this — flash mobs, impromptu gatherings — and there’s a social media component where, ‘the most that I can get attention, and the more that other people will notice me,’ that just fuels that taste for wanting to do social things like this," said sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia University professor who studies youth delinquency and deviance and recently ran product safety teams for Facebook and Twitter.

Going viral is "a badge of honor for kids," added Venkatesh, who also has been a senior adviser to the FBI.

"Think about it: 25, 20 years ago, you were living in a small town in Nebraska or living somewhere on Long Island, in Great Neck or something, you do this on your block, you’re just at a park. Chances are that’s gonna be something that a few people hear about," he said. "Now, things go viral. It’s kind of fun. Kids see that all the time, so they’re hoping that this might go viral."

Neighborhood annoyance

It’s less fun for others.

Earlier this year, Bob and Mary Henning saw a street takeover that drew dozens of cars and around 100 people —all from the backyard of the couple's Rosemont Brookhaven apartment in the Medford area. They said they’ve also seen and heard street races between three or four cars a couple of times a week in recent months.

When police broke up the Medford meetup, Mary Henning said, the couple was asleep.

Just beyond the trees between their backyard and that scene, black circles that appeared to be skid marks defaced a 50-foot stretch of Sawgrass Drive.

Growing up in another part of Medford in the 1990s, Angela Shaw, 44, said, dirt bikes dominating residential roadways was a common community concern. The need for speed, or at least a drag strip on Long Island, was a popular refrain — and still is. Shaw heard about street races back then, but never full takeovers, where roads are blocked by cars and crowds.

"I’m kind of surprised it’s happening out of nowhere," Shaw said. "I wonder, where is this coming from? Is this something that’s always happened, and just because I live here I’m hearing about it? Is this a resurgence of something?"

Turbocharging phenomena like these are social media platforms’ proprietary algorithms that automatically choose which posts to boost, which to show, to whom and how often, according to D. Yvette Wohn, the inaugural chair of Stony Brook University’s new department on technology, artificial intelligence and society.

"Algorithms on social media are a little bit of a black box, and sometimes the company itself is not able to completely explain how things happen," Wohn said.

But she added "it’s very rare that you get serendipitous content." Each user's phone pinpoints where the person is, information that is fed back to the social media app, so if "something is going viral online" near a user, other users will be more likely to be fed content about it.

And Wohn said, "If somebody is already engaged in certain types of behavior, they will be more likely to see posts related to that." The app also factors in demographics such as age.

Generations of 'rowdyism'

Stretching back decades, Newsday’s archives chronicle youths misbehaving via motor vehicles, with consequences ranging from merely irksome to deadly.

"I am going to break the back of this drag racing," an angry magistrate said, scolding 14 youths, including Long Islanders, ranging from ages 17 to 22, in 1962, when authorities found almost 200 "speed-happy hot-rodders who were using a three-mile stretch of roadway as a racing strip" and "terrorizing motorists."

Two years later, after similar incidents, Oyster Bay officials vowed to crack down on car-related "rowdyism" and other associated crime.

In 1980, Newsday reported that two people were killed as a racing driver plunged into a crowd of 200 spectators near the Nassau-Queens border "where officers have problems with large-scale organized races." A month earlier, three teens in Suffolk were killed in separate crashes involving illegal street racing and "a game of auto ‘cat and mouse.’ ”

The generations of yesteryear's transgressors and those who swooned over them have mellowed with age.

When the couple was first dating, Bob Henning raced down Deer Park Avenue in his 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 in an effort to impress his now wife. Mary Henning said she does not remember that episode, but could recall others.

"We raced down Sunrise Highway once or twice," she said. "But we did it when the streets were empty, when most people were home with their kids."

"I was 18," Bob Henning recalled. "That doesn’t make it right, but I was 18 or 19. ... There weren’t as many people. You didn’t have all the cars you have today."

Past generations wanted to show off their wheels for friends and romantic partners. But nowadays, he said, street racers also are trying to draw a much larger audience.

"There’s the internet, so people see it," he added. "They’re getting likes."