2) Has your bike been clipped from City property?Let us know. Email [email protected].
–Time's Up bulletin, January 2006
Harried as I was, I'd have thought twice if I'd known I was breaking the law. No long list of regs I've read at Battery Park City or in Hudson River Park mentions this one.
I was clueless.
Rushing to get to the bank before Friday closing and seeing a parkscape with no visible bikerack or nearby traffic signpost, I cabled my vintage no-name three-speed to a tree on West Thames Street close to the West Street riverside sidewalk ("City property"?).
Not my first choice for parking, but I buy vinyl-coated locks expressly because bare chain can damage bark. Who knew there's a law, one that makes no distinction? (Well, actually the statute that apparently applies doesn't even mention bikes, but that's a fine distinction.)
I got to the bank just in time for the guard to lock the door in my face, then trudged back to West Thames Street to find a photocopied form taped to the tree where my bike had been: The BPC police (like Hudson River Park police, contracted from the NYC Parks Department) had bolt-broken the cable and grabbed my bike.
After a couple of hours at the BPC police station, I rode home on a bike with no damage beyond the lock, but a little more character, burdened still by a need to get into the bank and newly by a summons for an appearance date two months hence and an urgent need for a replacement lock.
So I walked over to KMart and bought one. When I hit Broadway at Astor Place heading home, as if on cue one of the more astonishing spectacles I've witnessed in long years in downtown Manhattan riveted me.
I was slackjawed for a good … 20 minutes? On and on they rode, wave after wave after exhilarating wave of bicycles. It was a Critical Mass (understand, I'd never heard of Critical Mass), I learned from the dailies the next morning, 28 August 2004–news because of the busts; 236, was it, 270? (Oddly, however, in the previous few days I'd become aware of Time's Up.)
Coincidence that my own bike had been busted midafternoon 27 August?
At my hearing in October it devolved that no violation matched the number the smokie cited. Case dismissed, I could expect papers to that effect in a few weeks. When they arrived, it turned out Officer G. had submitted no further paperwork. Now, in effect the entire episode had never occurred.
The disposal of my case has caused me to ponder.
Should I just write it off to my usual mixed luck? The cost of replacing my lock, the various inconveniences, and long weeks of insomniac anxiety till the hearing, vs the outcome, not least ducking a possible $400 fine when I was undeniably guilty, however "innocently."
Was the smokie incompetent? Distracted by something important? Or did he consider my demeanor (calm, courteous, patient to a fault) during the hours I waited at the BPC station house, and appearance (middle-class white female of a certain age), decide to cut me some slack, and screw up the paperwork deliberately? Would he have been that sloppy if I were black, male, and young?
Had that morning's memo ordered a hit on all vulnerable bikes citywide that day, the first day of a campaign that's still ongoing? Did his processing constitute passive-aggressive resistance to it? Just seems peculiar to me that the most serious run-in I've had with the law in a long life happened over a bike issue that particular day.
Whatever, that weird experience, NYPD policy since regarding bikes and in particular Critical Mass and other peaceful protest, the excessive NYPD conduct I witnessed day after day in Union Square the week of the GOP convention (and New Yorkers' complacent attitude toward them all) have had the intended chilling effect on my sense of the fragility of civil liberties I'd always trusted to be secure, and repeatedly on my exercise of them.
Time was, New York City felt like the only place in America where cops grasped the difference between exuberant, peaceful exercise of free speech and violent provocation. Now NYC feels like the most threatening place in America to try to exercise constitutionally guaranteed rights. Casual use of the term "police state" used to grate. Now it feels like everyday NYC reality.
If money equates to free speech, in the streets as in the courts just as the more money one has the more free speech one may exercise, the less money the less free speech. The amount of free speech available to an individual citizen with little money in the land of the free is minuscule if even existent.
I'd expected someone someday to test some variation of that premise before the Supreme Court, but that was before a Scalito court loomed. My contemporary Lew Lapham calls this era the twilight of American democracy. I wouldn't argue that point.
Saturday, 28 January 2006
