Ride of Injustice to Cyclists

This Wednesday is the international Ride of Silence, in memory of those cyclists killed by motorists. I think we also need another ride, to honor the cyclists who have gotten screwed over by our police and justice systems. These would include:

• being ticketed or arrested for traffic infractions where they were innocent
• for having a judgment decided against them when they were in the right
• for allowing motorists clearly at fault in such incidents to face trivial to non-existent penalties
• for having a police report filed in an incident not corroborated by the facts.
• police reports of crashes and other incidents worded to assume the cyclist was in the wrong.
• for losing hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal fees, fines, and lost work time, while fighting cases in which they were innocent.
• for spending time behind bars because the system decided they were guilty even where the facts of the case said they were not.

This is not an exhaustive list of such situations, merely general categories.

I began a mental list of people just in my own network, and rapidly ran out of fingers to count on. With a little digging, I'm pretty sure I'd run out of toes, too. The point is, this is rampant. Whether or not blood and bone are involved, and all too often it is, cyclists are getting screwed by the police and justice systems. It does not matter if they have video evidence to support their side of the story. They still lose.

This is wrong and it needs to stop.

I thought about having a bike ride to protest the injustice that cyclists must face. Certainly it should not be part of the Ride of Silence, whose solemnity must be respected. But what to do instead?