In our car-dominated American society, using a bicycle as transportation is a very positive thing to do both on a society-wide level and especially on a personal level. Obviously, as someone who rides a bike as my primary mode of transportation and writes a daily bike blog, I love bikes and view them as great and wonderful things.
But bikes are just tools, and they hold no inherent virtues or morals. They are most often used by people getting around in a healthy, fun and emission-free way. But as Seattle Police have demonstrated, bikes can also be used for violence. While bike patrols at one point were using bikes more as a way to cover more ground more quickly and nimbly than an officer on foot or in a car, the bike has increasingly become a military-style tactical weapon officers use along with body armor, pepper spray and other crowd-suppression tools used to combat protests. Crosscut and Type Investigations published a story about SPD’s use of bikes that looked into these more violent uses (they also made a podcast-style version of the story).
“There was some thinking that bicycle units are somehow going to be better because it seems softer,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Center for Protest Law & Litigation, told Crosscut. “But we have seen bicycle units act with extreme violence, attacking en masse, throwing their bikes down and charging crowds of people.”
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