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Victory
at Little Big Horn Day
June 25, 2003
Buffalo Cops Wage
War on Pedal Pushers
Iatrogenic
Law Enforcement on the Niagara Frontier
By
BRUCE JACKSON
More than two dozen Buffalo police officers attacked
a peaceful group of bicyclists on 6:30 p.m. on Friday evening,
May 30. They kicked some and beat several with clubs and Mag-Lites.
They arrested nine of them on the kind of trumped-up felony charges
cops always levy when they've started a mess they shouldn't have
or beaten up folks they had no right to have been bothering in
the first place.
It's unlikely that the Buffalo police
department will discipline the cops who rioted or that they'll
initiate a training program to help the more excitable members
of the patrol force differentiate between perps committing felonies
and ordinary folk riding bicycles. The best thing that could
happen at this point would be for Erie County district attorney
Frank Clark to find a tactful way to toss all these bogus charges
into his prosecutorial garbage can as soon as he possibly can.
Critical Mass
The bicyclists were taking part in a
Critical Mass event. Critical Mass is more an idea than an organization.
Part of the idea is, get a bunch of bicyclists together and ride
around town to alert folks to the virtues of non-fossil-fuel
transportation and to make people aware that bicycles aren't
an interference with traffic but rather a legal part of traffic.
It's all very laid-back and benign. No speechifying or postering
the walls. Just a bunch of folks riding in pleasant company around
town, letting other folks know that there are transportation
possibilities other than cars and SUVs.
The first Critical Mass in Buffalo took
place three years ago. Police had that peleton (as anyone who
has ever watched the Tour de France on tv knows, a peleton is
a group of bicyclists in motion) pull over while they tried to
figure out something to charge them with. They couldn't find
anything, so they let the group go. They charged one person with
resisting arrest. I assume that charge was simply to demonstrate
that they were doing useful police work when they stopped the
group and couldn't come up with a legal reason for having done
so. The charge was dismissed.
According to the police charges and reports,
the cyclists were a swarm of violent villains and malefactors:
the nine people arrested were charged with felony riot, illegal
assembly, obstructing governmental administration, resisting
arrest, disorderly conduct, failing to get out of the way of
a police car with its siren going, kicking and biting and saying
dirty words.
Unfortunately for the police, the whole
event was well-photographed, not just by people in the group
but also by some people who ran into a nearby convenience store,
purchased disposable cameras and began shooting away. The police
tried to stop one photographer they seemed to think was getting
too close to the violence, Professor Michael Niman of Buffalo
State College. They grabbed Niman, pummeled and kicked him, handcuffed
him, and shoved him into a police car. He managed to hand his
camera to Janet Hinkel, who continued taking pictures with it.
I suspect that some of the cops later
wished they'd arrested Niman's camera too, because the sequence
of shots in it show everything from the police stopping the peleton
and ticketing two of the riders at the rear, the rest of the
group watching in obvious good humor, the first arrests and brutality,
and then, further arrests and brutality.
Nowhere, in any of the hundreds of photographs,
are there any images of any cyclist performing aggressively to
the police.
Crazy on Elmwood
It all started when Buffalo police officers
Michael Bauer and Daniel Horan stopped the bicyclists on Elmwood
Avenue, I think to tell them to move to the right or spread out
their line or whatever they had to do to make it easier for traffic,
should there be any, which there wasn't much of at that moment,
to pass by. They gave tickets to Maria Van Wyek-Haney and Matthew
Downey for not getting out of the way of a sirening speeding
police car, which seems unlikely, but no one in the group got
particularly upset. When the others figured out what was going
on they passed a hat and raised enough money to pay the two $75
tickets.
The police later claimed that the bicyclists
were holding up traffic, but photographs of the scene show that
traffic wasn't actually stopped until the police parked their
car in the middle of the road-first so they could talk to the
riders in front, and later so they could write their tickets
to the two riders in back.
The police then arrested University at
Buffalo student Gerald Bove, a bicyclist who had crossed Elmwood
to find out what was happening. They charged him with jaywalking
and put him into the police car. So far as I know, no one has
ever been arrested in Buffalo for jaywalking previously. This
part of Elmwood is where pizza shoppers regularly double-park
in lines up three and four cars long and no one is ever ticketed
or even told to pull into a parking space. Sometimes it's the
cops double-parked in front of the pizza joints.
Some of the bicyclists at the front of
the group came back to see what was wrong. A second police car
arrived and the cops who got out of this one seem, according
to all accounts and the photographs, to have thought they were
there to deal with Hell's Angels: they wore leather gloves and
waved clubs and heavy Mag-Lite cop flashlights. They were ready
for violence and when they didn't find any they brought their
own.
Heron Simmonds, who teaches ethics at
Canisius College in Buffalo, asked why they were arresting Bove,
whereupon Officer John Santiago handcuffed Simmonds and led him
off to a police car. Simmonds was the only African-American bicyclist
in the group and no one has yet figured out the real reason he
was arrested. Bicycling While Black? Asking Questions While Black?
Niman was photographing Simmonds being
taken to the police car when he was attacked.
After that, everything went haywire.
Some cops bent a woman over the truck
of a police car and one of them hit her with a nightstick. Sibhohan
McCollum, a student at Buff State and one of the cyclists, said
to a police lieutenant, "Please, you have to stop hitting
people," whereupon she was bent over a police car, handcuffed
and taken away. A woman with two children in her car stopped
and asked the police to stop beating a bicyclist. They arrested
her and took her away.
In all, four women were arrested, every
one of them because she was pleading with police to stop clubbing
someone who wasn't doing anything except standing or lying there
getting clubbed.
"Why are they
hitting people?"
I asked McCollum what happened and this
is what she told me:
I was standing behind Heron when he was
arrested. I was there for the bulk of his dialog with the officer.
It was absurd. The police had told us to get off the street and
we did. We were on the sidewalk and the cobblestone between the
sidewalk and the street. Then a police officer came and told
us to get off of the sidewalk.
I saw Mike when he was on the ground
being attacked. I don't know what they were doing. I had run
off the sidewalk to see what was happening . I thought they were
going to kill him. Just all of a sudden this hell breaks loose.
As they were in the midst of this conflict with Mike, Officer
Horan was standing next to me and he said, "Get off the
street, get off the street." I think I was in a state of
shock. All I could say until I ended up at the police station
was 'What's happening? Why are they hitting people? Why are they
doing this? What's happening?' He just escorted me to the sidewalk,
where I stayed. And that was the only time I was in the street
through the whole thing. I went to the window of the car Mike
had been put into, then his wife appeared and I moved away. At
this point the chaos was happening. There was just a mass of
bodies and police cars screeching up. People coming up carrying
their billy clubs and flashlights. I saw people getting hit and
I was standing on the sidewalk saying, "Please stop hitting
people, please stop hitting people. Why are you doing this. Please
stop hitting people." And then I made eye contact with
Lieutenant Keene. He was coming toward me and I turned toward
him and looked him in the eyes and said, "Please, you have
to stop hitting people." He grabbed me by the neck of my
hooded sweatshirt and slammed me on the car and threw cuffs on
me. [I said, "And your offense was what, talking to a police
officer in public?"] I used my manners and I made eye contact.
I'm not stupid enough to use foul language with the police. They're
in a position of power. You don't want to get yourself in trouble.
All I could say was "Please stop hitting people." Because
I couldn't believe that this thing was happening. I was too scared
to run when it was happening because what happens if you run?
Are you going to get chased? It was madness. So I was thrown
to the car and then Lieutenant Keene handed me off to a guy,
I think his name was Vasquez who wasn't involved at all in the
attacks. He was standing next to the car while I was on the car
and he very gently escorted me off to a cruiser to put me in.
Again, I kept saying, "What's happening? Why are they hitting
people? Why are they hitting people?" He looked devastated.
He shook his head and he said, "I don't know." I don't
understand it at all. They were so angry. They looked so angry.
And we hadn't done anything. As far as I could see there was
no aggression, there wasn't even any action on the part of the
cyclists. Looking back over the photographs, we're all standing
still. They're the ones who are in positions of action. Everyone
is just in shock. This is the enemy?
"Iatrogenic" is the word the
medical profession has for medical problems introduced by physicians
or medication or treatment programs. "Iatrogenic" is
when you get sick because you encountered the people or companies
who were supposed to be making you well.
That's what Buffalo cops did on Elmwood
Avenue at 6:30 p.m. Friday evening. They turned a pleasant situation-that
group of maybe 100 bicyclists riding around town in the hope
of alerting people to the advantages of ecologically viable modes
of transportation-into a bloody mess.
People who ride bicycles in groups are
perhaps the most benign amateur athletes there are. Instead of
trying to beat the fastest guy in the group they wait for the
slowest to catch up. Instead of trying to amass a score they
take pleasure simply in pedaling on. You can't come on as a tough-guy
in those silly poster-color clothes and stretch-pants serious
bicyclists wear, and you can hardly walk in the biking shoes.
That's why I don't believe for a minute
the Buffalo police department claims that the reason they started
strumming heads with their clubs and flashlights on Elmwood Avenue
was because the bicyclists got nasty to them.
The most that should have happened is
the cops telling the group to try to stay more to the right,
and even that is arguable. Elmwood is the slowest boulevard in
the city and bicyclists riding alone almost always make better
time than automobiles. The photographs show that there was almost
no traffic on Elmwood when the police parked in the middle of
the road and caused the chaos.
What cops fear
Sometimes it seems to me that the one
thing cops fear and loathe almost as much as an armed felon hiding
behind a dumpster in a dark alley is looking stupid, appearing
as if they had no idea what they were doing.
The cops who assaulted Buffalo's bicyclists
had no idea what they were doing. If they thought the bicyclists
were slowing up other traffic improperly (in New York, bicycles
have as much right to the road as automobiles and trucks and
motorcycles) they should have told the group that, let the group
move on and then moved on themselves. But their commands were
muddled from the beginning, and they seemed to have little idea
what the applicable law was. One told the cyclists to ride on
the sidewalk, another told them to get off the sidewalk, another
told them they had to disperse. All three orders were wrong and
the bicyclists knew it.
The deeper in they got, the more they
had to defend what they were doing. Every bit they escalated
required another bit of escalation to prove the escalation that
just happened had been worthwhile. It's like the Inquisition
torturers Michel Foucault describes in the first chapter of Discipline
and Punish who have the attitude that anyone they're torturing
must be guilty of something, else why would the torturers be
torturing them like this?
There's no returning from that kind of
logic once it comes into play. Reason, common sense, sanity-they
won't help one bit. Every single thing you say inflames them
further, which is why the people the Buffalo cops arrested at
the end were people who were simply asking why the Buffalo cops
were arresting anybody in the first place.
Your lying eyes
The comedian Richard Pryor had a bit
about a woman who comes home and finds her husband having sex
with another woman. "Who you gonna believe," the husband
says, "me or your lying eyes?"
That seems to be the official line toward
all of this being taken by the Buffalo Police Department. Deputy
Police Commissioner Mark Blankenberg told the Buffalo News that
he examined the photographs and "said they show his officers
acted appropriately."
Erie County District Attorney Frank Clark
told the News, "After looking at these sort of things for
over 30 years, I know that the truth usually lies somewhere in
the middle."
Usually, but not always. Not this time.
These events aren't civil litigation where you try to give each
side enough so both can go home feeling they at least got something
of what they thought they were owed. Sometimes one side is really
wrong and the other side isn't. Thus far, the only thing that
seems to have caused strong reactions from the bicyclists was
the police making absurd arrests, beating and handcuffing people.
This is an embarrassment for the Buffalo
police department and for the city. District Attorney Frank Clark
can make most of it go away, and he should-by tossing all these
bogus charges filed by the police. And every cop who misbehaved
on Elmwood last Friday should have his cop car and truncheon
taken away and should be made to patrol the city's streets on
a bicycle for the rest of his career. Their health would improve,
and maybe their relationship to ordinary citizens would as well.
It's really hard to be violent when you're riding a bicycle.
Bruce Jackson
edits the web magazine BuffaloReport.com.
He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo.
His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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