Thoughts for the Midweek: Free-Range History

(edit: I polished this up a little bit the following morning. I should stop writing when I’m so tired.)

Thanks again to the influx of newcomers, and hope you stick around.

I’m on the road for the next few days; in anticipation of my home shifting a few hundred miles south I’m spending the end of the week a few hundred miles north. Life is fun like that.

Here’s some food for thought until I get back to the usual ramblings. Here’s The New York Times’ take on an incident which many have been talking about on- and offline.

NYT:

The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history.

This article comes courtesy of longtime buddy Jared Simons, who has been keeping tabs on a story that’s spread like wildfire around the cyberspace: during the Critical Mass ride in New York last week, an officer body-checked a cyclist seemingly unprovoked and later lied about it in a sworn statement, causing the cyclist to be detained for 26 hours. This is not new by any stretch; friends of mine who ride the Mass in New York often report incidents of rider abuse by the police, and a standard maxim in the protesting world applies to cyclists as well: citizen meets cop in court, cop wins. It takes a landslide of evidence to change that, typically.

The video in question:

I for one do participate in Critical Mass in Boston, and I’m proud to defend that fact. When done right, Critical Mass simply shows drivers that there are many of us cyclists out there. When done right, we show that we have rights. When done right, the riders obey the laws and rules of the road and traffic moves at about the same pace as it does on any Friday afternoon, with substantially cleaner air and a lot more general merriment. When done right, the awareness that it raises will draw many new riders to bike to school and work, making life easier for all. People get agitated when cyclists do not do it right – when they run red lights, bully cars, or otherwise endanger drivers. I will defend one questionable action of the ride: a popular tactic is to block the sidestreet traffic while the bikes are passing through. I do not count blocking traffic as doing the “wrong” thing, as most of the time it is done to prevent all-too-eager drivers from cutting off cyclists with the right of way, endangering all involved.

Jared’s perspective on all of this is quite valuable, as his self-proclaimed disregard for Critical Mass makes his criticism of Officer Patrick Pogan’s behavior all the more powerful. He and NYT writer Jim Dwyer are right: truth is being exposed in a whole new way, care of the easy availability to record the world. This citizen recording is a powerful tool, as we have seen. It has given us the images we think of when people say things like “George Allen,” “Rodney King,” “Don’t Tase Me, Bro,” or “World Trade Center.” Some of these incidents are haunting, some end political careers, and some are simply for amusement.

I take issue with Dwyer’s calling it a “free-range history,” however. It isn’t a history with a modifier. It’s just history. It is a recording of that moment in time. We need not add demeaning modifiers to that fact. It may be incomplete, and perhaps skewed based on perspective, but so is every history.

What this history is showing us is the beginnings of a very grave issue, and it goes well beyond cyclists and Officers that at best are endangering lives and at worst are exercising in targeted abuses of power based on ideological disagreements. Truth is starting to come out in the weirdest of places. Truth slips out of the cameras of tourists and is captured on cell phones by passersby. And, for once, these images do not go through any figure of authority before they are shown. When the truth expose a corruption in the government or other public institution, harsh discipline is warranted. Now, we will see in September, when this goes to court, whether this is enough to reprimand the Officer and defend the cyclist. And if it is, we can hope that the impact of this will ripple to other cases of this nature, when those involved weren’t so lucky as to have cameras pointed at them.

One thing we can learn from this immediately: we as a society frequently treat those who complain about police brutality or government corruption as fringe, outsiders, or overly paranoid. We have seen this week that these labels aren’t always warranted. Before we dismiss the next complaint of police brutality simply because “it’s his/her word against the Officer’s,” remember the video. The truth is, we cannot know for sure what prompted the Officer to target this particular cyclist, and perhaps his actions are warranted. We should not assume. But, what we do know is that the Officer lied about it in his statement, and should be severely disciplined for doing so.