ST. LOUIS — FOX 2 has exclusive video of reckless drivers interrupting a Fox 2 News interview about the issue of reckless driving in St. Louis.
It happened around 3:15 Thursday afternoon on Broadway in South St. Louis, near the old Lemp Brewery. Fox 2’s Andy Banker was interviewing 8th Ward Alderwoman, Cara Spencer, about her proposal to “boot” the vehicles of reckless drivers.
Four young men roared past doing ‘wheelies’ on motorcycles and an ATV. The ATV rider circled cars waiting at a stoplight.
It was frightening.
“This is absolutely the kind of behavior we want to address,” Alderwoman Spencer said, moments after the incident. “Those scooters should not be allowed to do that on our city streets. It’s remarkably dangerous. They did a u-turn (around car drivers waiting at the light). It’s very intimidating. It’s very dangerous. We’ve seen lives lost and families forever changed. It’s time we do something serious about reckless driving.”
According to St. Louis Police, a reckless driver killed a Chicago woman and her daughter who were crossing a street after a drake concert in downtown St. Louis last week.
A year earlier, a Tennessee teen who was in St. Louis for a volleyball tournament lost her legs after being hit in a reckless driving crash while she was walking downtown.
In 2020, a DeSoto teen was thrown from a pickup truck and killed in yet another reckless driving crash downtown.
From avenues to interstates, blatant reckless driving continues to go unaddressed city-wide.
Spencer is about to introduce a new bill to the Board of Aldermen calling for the vehicles of reckless drivers to be disabled with metal “boots” locked to a wheel to disable the vehicle. Offenders would have to post a $500 bond to have a boot removed.
Spencer believes it will have a much greater impact than tickets and court summonses that routinely go ignored.
“A police officer can pull you over, write you a ticket, and then you essentially go about your merry way and are able to continue driving recklessly and continue endangering our community. So, what this does is disable the vehicle from being able to be driven in a manner that can kill someone. Cars are weapons when operated recklessly,” Spencer said. “We are allowing this to just run rampant.”
It was perhaps never more clear than when the four reckless drivers went speeding by our interview doing ‘wheelie’s while pointing and hollering at Spencer and our Fox 2 News crew.