UPDATE: Go join in the fracas over at iReport.com, where this video has gotten over 48,000 61,000 107,000 121,900 views since posting on CNN.com’s front page Saturday afternoon. Clearly there is not enough real news being iReported.

If you were robbed, mugged, or otherwise assaulted or injured in the downtown Atlanta area between 6:45 and 8:00pm on Friday, we bicyclists do apologize for your lack of police protection. You see, we were busy occupying about a dozen motorcycle cops and several police cruisers with our monthly bike ride.

Two months ago when I filed my Choose or Lose story on Critical Mass, I made a specific point to mention that our local police force was actually rather cooperative with us cyclists compared to other cities. I had seen numerous videos before of uncomfortably hostile encounters between cops and Massers in San Francisco (the city of origin), Chicago, and New York, and I had had numerous conversations with Atlanta riders about how nice our local PD was to us. In the downtown area, where police were frequently out on the street directing traffic for tourist destinations, conference attendees, and sports fans, they often stopped cross traffic long enough to get the whole Mass through (and, blessedly, out of their way).

That warm and fuzzy relationship is apparently over. Last month, reporter Stacy Shelton wrote up Critical Mass in the AJC, and apparently someone at City Hall knows how to read. Whoever this literate person is wasn’t about to tolerate any civil disobedience in their fair city, and they ordered the police force into action. Here you go, in video form:


MP4 video enclosure

Before we had even gotten past Centennial Olympic Park — maybe half a mile from our starting point downtown — we were intercepted. A phalanx of motorcycle cops was poised on the sidewalk, ready to disrupt the ride. Apparently, only one of them had any cojones, because only a single cyclist was pulled over and ticketed for running a red light. The rest of them must have been too busy oogling the cleavage on wheels or something.

Once we had ridden past, the blood returned to their heads and they managed to figure out where we were going. We saw a few of our law enforcement friends again in Midtown, but things were pretty hunky dory until we crossed over into Virginia Highland and headed south toward Little Five Points. As we approached North Avenue heading south on Highland, the phalanx reappeared out of nowhere, cutting the Mass in half at Manuel’s Tavern and giving pursuit to the front half, which went another quarter of a mile before turning east on Freedom Parkway. By the time the rest of us caught up, the bikes were dismounting the pavement and running up the grass onto the pedestrian path along the Parkway; the motorcycle phalanx and a few cruisers had stationed themselves along the roadway leading up to Moreland.

And then they stood there. (See video.) Some of the braver and/or more confrontational cyclists kept on riding down Freedom Parkway while the rest of us rode in parallel on the walkway, watching (and in several cases, filming). The cops just stood there on their bikes, glaring, like it was some kind of staring contest (or perhaps a who’s-got-the-bigger-wang testosto-fest). They didn’t leap into action as we began to spill back onto Moreland heading south, but perhaps that’s because we came to a stop and in many cases signaled our turns. Or maybe we were in West Side Story, who knows.

Another motorcycle cop was waiting for us a quarter mile later in Little Five Points, as if expecting orders from his Parkway brethren on which one to pull over and ticket. We stopped at the light and then turned right/west into the residential neighborhood to get out of their sight. A much thinner, slower, more fragmented Mass headed down Sinclair for Inman Park.

We didn’t get far. The Freedom Parkway boys found us again at Austin and Elizabeth, and they did a pretty good job of clusterfracking the intersection of Highland and Elizabeth up themselves in an effort to make sure we all observed the stop sign.

Here’s the thing: when you have 400 cyclists out at one time all deciding to take the same route, it’s really in your best interest to let them all pass at once, sacrificing a red light or two if you must, rather than demanding we all stop and look left, right, and left again. Instead of almost a half a mile of solid bikes on the road, you’ll have three miles of two abreast. You want really that?

We made it several more blocks down Highland before the motorbikes raced ahead of us and basically formed a roadblock at Highland and Randolph. So we stopped — losing a number of us to Johnny’s Pizza — and turned left/south on Samson. By the time I caught up with what was left of the Mass at Samson and Irwin, there were a handful of cops there making sure we came to a complete stop and looked both ways before crossing.

The group finally built up some momentum again on Edgewood, but not as much momentum as a dozen or so police officers who just realized how much fun it is stalking and hassling bicyclists. A couple of their motorbikes came whipping past us again and managed to get to the front of the group in time to pull another cyclist over to ticket him for a traffic violation. The rest of the hundred and change cyclists left erupted into whoops and applause as these two brave officers were reinforced by one, two, three, four more motorcycle cops in order to enforce the law on this dangerous commuter-terrorist. A couple of police cruisers pulled up behind and alongside us, so that when the light — keeping us frozen in law abiding stillness while red — turned green, they could use their fancy loudspeakers and bark, “Move along! Move along!” And as it turned yellow again a couple of siren-whoops reminded the eager to stop at the broad white line.

I don’t know if the cops pursued what was left of the Mass all the way back downtown; I turned back at that point to get a beer with friends who had peeled off in Cabbagetown, not wanting their first Critical Mass to result in legal action. But this was definitely a strategic prerogative from on high. In all of my rides with the group, I have never seen such prominent police interference, and in all of my life in Atlanta, I have never seen such police organization, never seen so many cops in one place at one time with such well-timed serendipity. They were all out there just to pursue us and hassle at opportunity. They were reasserting the city’s power after Shelton’s article had made so public how intolerably open-minded they had been to people who actually wanted to do something about our oil addiction. Boy oh boy, did those big mens with their bikes and guns show us.

So, yeah, sorry if you actually needed a cop while we were out riding bikes. They were too busy keeping you safe from the Monkeywrench Gang.



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