Four cyclists were killed by cars in the Twin Cities last month. Tomorrow there will be a memorial ride. Details here.

Bicycling is becoming a lot more popular as a daily mode of transportation. As such, I see a lot of cyclists doing it dangerously, and a lot more venom from annoyed drivers. Cyclists need to follow the rules of the road, and so do drivers. But realistically, the whole infrastructure is stacked against cyclists; drivers mostly think cyclists have no right to the road, and police reinforce this by enforcing the rules against cyclists while giving drivers free rein. Three foot clearance means three foot clearance.

And stop means stop (to drivers and cyclists alike).

The monthly Critical Mass ride in Minneapolis has been going on for a while now, and I don’t think they’ve had any trouble from police on this scale before. Twenty people were arrested, by excessive force. The police claim that one of the riders deliberately veered into a police car, and they expect that to be satisfactory explanation for their actions: pulling people off their bikes, spraying mace indiscriminately into the crowd (and hitting bystanders), and punching riders. Some witnesses are also saying that at least one squad car was deliberately driven into cyclists.

But of course, a bicycle is much less danger to a squad car than the other way around, so—and I cannot stress this enough, because Americans and some of my previous commenters can’t quite seem to get it—in no way were the police actions justified. Even if a cyclist did in fact drive into a squad car, there is no call for punching people and spraying mace in their faces.

As a final note, if the officers’ goal was to promote traffic safety, why would they be riding at speed down Nicollet Avenue like this?

photo from http://www.tonywebster.com/criticalmass/, © Tony Webster. Creative Commons license.

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        <p>There can be absolutely no excuse made for this kind of police behavior. The officer's actions were wrong from the very beginning of the incident. Stopping a cyclist in a potentially dangerous traffic situation is perfectly acceptable; stopping any vehicle by shouting out through the squad car window is dubious at best.</p>

Stopping a cyclist by shouting through the window of a moving squad car, a much larger vehicle, is an improper action. Cars are much larger and heavier than cyclists, and thus a danger, particularly when the operator is (or appears to be) operating from frustration and anger. The officer should have pulled into the lane behind Mr. Orsak and used the squad car’s megaphone, or spoken calmly through the window to instruct him to pull over. Or he could have simply turned on the lights and momentarily hit the siren.

As it was, it seems perfectly sensible to me that Mr. Orsak would seek to end as quickly as possible an exchange that started badly and degraded from there. Police abuses are too common an occurrence to simply follow instructions and wait until “you can take it up with some higher authority”. If an officer is already “abrupt and abrasive”, as D.Q. puts it, at the beginning of the stop, I as the cyclist being stopped am already at high risk, and would want to escape the situation as quickly as possible.

That risk, unfortunately, turned into direct harm when the officer used a weapon on Mr. Orsak. D.Q. also acknowledges that this was uncalled for, but I’m disconcerted that he* seems to make allowances for the officers’ behavior leading to the use of the taser. The assumption in his two postings seems to be that when one is stopped by the police, one should simply obey, no matter what the officer commands.

It simply is not sensible nor self-protective to yield unconditionally to a police officer who has stopped you. This incident is evident proof of that fact. As both a resident of Saint Paul and a regular bicycle commuter, I was disturbed by the story (and how little press it’s gotten), and by the normalization of the notion that we should unquestioningly acquiesce to police power.