The police officer who shoulder-checked a cyclist right off his bike during a Critical Mass ride in Manhattan last summer is in court today. As a citizen, I am very happy about this. The officer committed an act of violence, then lied about it on an official report. I don't think any reasonable person who has seen the video would believe that "after instructing Mr. Long to stop . . . Mr. Long rammed him with his bicycle, causing the officer to fall to the ground and receive cuts on his forearms."
As a cyclist, however, I have mixed emotions about the high profile of this case because it is a distraction from the conflict a the heart of the Critical Mass movement.
For those of you who are not familiar with Critical Mass, I recommend the beginning of the Wikipedia article as a general overview. The most important thing to remember in trying to understand Critical Mass is that the core issue common to every person involved--riders, drivers, police, etc.--is about the acceptable uses of public space, specifically the streets.
This is why I have mixed feelings about the trial. I believe it should be simple and straightforward: the officer lied and got caught, end of story. But it won't be, and it will likely bring up issues that should be debated in public, not in a courtroom where a specific verdict hangs in the balance. The defense will inevitably bring up the issue of whether or not those cyclists should have been out there in the first place. They may suggest that Long was a troublemaker, or that the officer was a victim of the generally hostile environment created by the riders, or some other thing that, true or untrue, is irrelevant to the fact that he lied in his report.
I have participated in a few of these rides, and I can attest that there are always a wide range of motivations among participants. Some are environmentalists wanting to promote alternative transportation. Some consider it a way to highlight a public safety issue on crowded city streets. Others consider it a protest against what they consider undue police controls. I have also met people who just think it is exciting to be part of the ride. And yes, there are people join because it is fun to cause trouble. The list goes on, as does the list of reasons people oppose the rides. The riders disrupt the flow of traffic, and often ignore traffic laws. They create their own public safety problem, even while highlighting another. The fact that the rides have no specific governing body, routes, or membership makes them unpredictable, and prevents even reasonable regulation. Etc.
I will not debate the merits of any of these positions here. Instead I want to focus on that core question of what are acceptable uses of our streets, and who gets to decide. I went to the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village a couple of months ago, which is an excellent example of a sanctioned disruption of the city's traffic. With hundreds of thousands of spectators, it's a big one, too. But immediately after the parade I found the police trying desperately to clear those hundreds of thousands out of the streets and press them onto the sidewalks so that cars could get through. It was utterly futile, and visibly frustrating for the officers. The question it raised in my mind was, why is a giant crowd of pedestrians expected to make way for a comparatively tiny number of cars? In that situation, everyone had somewhere to go, and needed to use the street to get there. Was it right to try to give priority to the cars? I'm not comfortable with the idea that a large enough crowd should be allowed to disrupt other activities simply by strength of numbers. On the other hand, the people in this crowd were trying to go somewhere, which is generally what a street is used for. If priority is automatically given to cars, does that mean a few hundred thousand people should drive to the parade?
These same issues are at stake in the debate over Critical Mass, and they go well beyond nuisance cyclists or careless drivers or the actions of the police. If we want these issues to be resolved, we need to decide what our streets are really for, and we need to do it publicly.