Tuesday, November 25, 2003
And, in another adventure in the Buffalo Courts, a verdict has been handed down in the Critical Mass rioting case. Regular readers will recall that the Buffalo Police and a group of bicycles were involved in an altercation last May: the cops busted a bunch of the bicyclists, and some bicyclists heads over a disagreement about the right of way. The police have all the cards in these sort of dust-ups: they have clubs, and solidarity, and a legal system that depends upon them in order to function. The lawyers for the cyclists made a gutsy move, and waived a jury trial. It couldn't have hurt that they happened to have drawn one of the better judges around these parts, but even so, asking a judge to throw out all of the charges in a case like this is asking a lot, and in the end this judge couldn't do it. Of course, I wasn't there, and I didn't hear the proof, but convictions on two non-criminal violations, carrying two $95 fines looks to me like a bone thrown to the police by a judge "who said he was both 'flattered and dismayed that there was no jury' in the case and that he 'never had a more difficult' verdict to reach in almost a decade on the bench."
I'll just throw in here that if more Buffalo cops were on bikes, we'd have better policing, and better looking police. And, now that this story is over, maybe the stupid version of the Clash's "White Riot" that I've had stuck in my head all this time will finally go away: "Bike riot/I wannna riot/Bike riot/A riot of my own". Oy.
I'll just throw in here that if more Buffalo cops were on bikes, we'd have better policing, and better looking police. And, now that this story is over, maybe the stupid version of the Clash's "White Riot" that I've had stuck in my head all this time will finally go away: "Bike riot/I wannna riot/Bike riot/A riot of my own". Oy.
// posted by Bill @ 7:49 PM 
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