“The Seattle Police Department is aware of a video circulating on the Internet showing an SPD motorcycle officer’s bike over the head of individual mendacity on the street,” a Seattle police press release said on September 24.
The incident was captured in protests that began last night after a grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky, refused to call officials for killing Breonna Taylor, an unarmed, sleepy black woman in 26, on March 13, free danger from shooting into the apartments. Taylor’s neighbors.
The grand jury’s resolution sparked protests in Louisville and several U. S. cities, adding Portland, Chicago and Seattle.
Seattle police arrested thirteen other people amid nighttime protests, police said.
“In total, police arrested thirteen other people for fees ranging from destruction of property, resisting arrest and non-dispersion, as well as assaulting a police officer,” the police said.
Several officials were injured, adding one that hit his head with a baseball bat that broke his helmet.
One of the Seattle Police Department’s responses to overnight protests is the deployment of its team of armored motorcycles, whose members have already been captured on video, allegedly committing acts of violence against protesters.
Last year, viral videos gave the impression of showing officials using patrol motorcycles to fight counter-combaters a pro-Trump march. Incidents were filmed in Seattle on December 7, the Mega MAGA march. In a video, an officer tripped a patrol motorcycle with the steering wheel and gave the impression of accelerating towards the nearest counter-manifestant at a peak. In a momentary video, a police officer gave the impression of intentionally walking on his bike in the back of a protester on the sidewalk.
In many recent videos shared on social media, bike cops are shown intertwining motorcycles to create cellular barriers, shouting as they pass, “Back off!Come back!”
In June, police departments in several cities were criticized for employing patrol motorcycles to control crowd protests in reaction to George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis on May 31.
The use of patrol motorcycles in the crowd through police officers has a long history: the New York motorcycle police team in 1895 was led by then-police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, a cyclist who wrote in his autobiography that “any feat of audacity that can simply be completed on [the motorcycles, the team] was sure to do so” , however, the fashion edition was developed in Seattle in the 1990s.
Through a service called Tiger Mountain Tactical, officers from the Seattle Police Department’s motorcycle team trained police forces in the United States.
Tiger Mountain Tactical, or TMT, describes itself as “an existing team of law enforcement officials who have the utmost comprehensive wisdom and revel in the operations of the police team by bicycle. “
TMT’s lead instructor is Jim Dyment, a 28-year veteran of the Seattle Police Department (Lieutenant Dyment responded to interview requests for this article).
According to the TMT website, Dyment “developed the first policy and for the control of the multitude of bicycles from the reports of the 1999 World Trade Organization Conference in Seattle. “
Another 50,000 people showed up to protest the meeting. Many protesters were well organized, cell phones to coordinate their activities, denying many of the city’s outdated insurrection tactics. however, with the exception of polystyrene bike helmets, they were able to fend for themselves, proving to be more cellular and flexible than the officers in the cars.
Writing for Law and Order magazine in April 2016, Dyment said, “The police cyclist maintains a constant presence in a crowd, which obviously deters the behavior of criminals. “
One tactic Dyment teaches at TMT is the “mobile fence line. “
“This,” he wrote, “is a team tactic that uses coordinated movement (lift the bike and move it one or two steps forward) of the motorcycle line to move forward. This is done in a disciplined, consistent and planned manner. “
As described in a 2002 article written through the vanquished Mike Goetz, a Seattle Bike Team officer, a non-unusual police tactic is “the crossbow. “
For this tactic, the police brigade “forms a double column on the line, far enough away that it can increase a little,” Goetz wrote.
“By order, the line makes an area in the middle and motorcycles pass through this area. “
“Once they are in position,” Goetz continued, “marquee officers pass and use their motorcycles as barriers. If the crowd becomes a threat, a spray application [pepper] can be applied. The main runners arrest or care for the runners,” injured person, and the team retreats to safety. This manoeuvre should be performed with sufficient speed and strength to make a hole in the crowd, and finish temporarily enough so that the crowd does not have time to react.
Today’s bicycle officers would possibly be more armored, and heavily armed, but, as Goetz wrote in 2002, bicycle cops are effective because they are fast and agile: “The speed and mobility of the team allow it to temporarily overwhelm a crowd if it moves in an unwanted direction. A team or two of motorcycles located several blocks from the action can be moved in a fraction of the time it takes to move a standing equipment or even a team of vehicles, as motorcycles have no obstacles across stairs. , traffic or lack of roads”.
Similarly, Dyment wrote in 2016 that motorcycles have the “ability to adhere to coordinated, fast and dynamic crowds. “
Follow? Yes, rolling over the heads of the protesters down the mendacity?
The name replaced on September 24 from “mounting” on a protester’s head to “overflow. “This describes more what the incident described in the article should look like.
I’m a transport journalist from 2018 in the Press Gazette. I’m also a historian: my most recent books include “Roads Were Not Built for Cars” and “Bike Boom,” both
I am a transport journalist of the year 2018 through press Gazette. I’m also a historian: my most recent books include “Roads Were Not Built for Cars” and “Bike Boom,” published through Island Press, Washington, D. C.