Tampa police have written 2,504 bike tickets — more than Jacksonville, Miami, St. Petersburg and Orlando combined.
Police say they are gung ho about bike safety and focused on stopping a plague of bike thefts.
But here’s something they don’t mention about the people they ticket: Eight out of 10 are black.
Just go read the entire article. It is beyond belief. The part that struck me the most, however, was that the “Bicycle Blitzkrieg” squad actually made the streets more dangerous for cyclists:
Despite the thousands of hours spent by police, court clerks, public defenders, prosecutors and judges on enforcement of bicycle laws, it’s hard to tell what Tampa gets out of them.
Even though 2013 was one of the department’s highest ticketing years, bike crashes still rose the following year by 20 percent. Bike thefts, too, climbed 15 percent.
[…] blog Systemic Failure flagged the Times’ investigation, calling it “beyond belief” and noting that […]
[…] the Tampa Police had, in effect, a stop-and-frisk policy of black bicyclists. They called it the bicycle blitzkrieg, and 8 out of 10 people ticketed were […]