A late-August law enforcement interagency operation in Costa Rica deployed nearly one hundred officers who cracked down on illegal street racing at different points in the Greater San Jose Metropolitan Area (Spanish acronym: GAM).
More than 1,000 vehicles and their drivers were intercepted at new gathering spots where illegal drag racers congregate. According to Roberto Portuguez of news daily La Prensa Libre, about a dozen vehicles modified and tuned for racing were impounded in a single night, along with five “crotch rockets,” high-performance motorcycles apt for racing. Aside from the vehicle confiscations, officers also took four illegal handguns, 125 grams of marijuana and 36 hits of crack cocaine.
Officers from Fuerza Publica (the national police), the Transit Police and the Organization for Judicial Investigations (OIJ in Spanish) surprised the street racers, known as “picones” in the slang vernacular of Costa Rica. The picones had grown confident in recent months due to the presence of confidential informants in racing circles who also work in law enforcement; alas, investigators applied their own countermeasures to combat the leak of tactical information.
The crackdown on street racing in Costa Rica is part of a comprehensive plan to reduce this dangerous activity. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Transport and Public Works (MOPT in Spanish) announced the creations of specialized brigades dedicated to the clampdown of street racing; to this end, the Transit Police has recently acquired new speed monitoring devices that incorporate radar and GPS technology as well as video surveillance.
The Costa Rica Star recently reported on the upper hand that street racers gained by having snitches planted in law enforcement ranks. These police officers are also street racing enthusiasts or gearheads (fans of auto technology and vehicle modification). In the beginning, police commanders did not mind these leaks since they actually prevented illegal street racing; recently, however, law enforcement agents planted their own snitches among the picones community so that they could learn about new drag racing spots.
Article by Costa Rica Star