Environmental group Times Up! is taking advantage of all the publicity generated by the video of a cop shoving a cyclist off his bike by reminding everyone that this is hardly the first such incident, nor the only one caught on video. The group points out that in 2007 one Richard Vazquez was taken down by a cop in Times Square during a Critical Mass ride, and in 2006 Adrienne Wheeler, a Critical Mass legal observer, was pulled off her bike by then-NYPD-Assistant-Chief Bruce Smolka, who's since retired. (The city settled with Wheeler for $37,000.) In a statement, Times Up! asserts that, “Unfortunately the July 25, 2008 incident is part of a pattern of targeting Critical Mass bike riders.” What's also unfortunate is that the production values on these old videos fail to live up to the new gold standard for police brutality porn.
Published Jul 30, 2008
Modified Jul 30, 2008
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