Kirby's article is online!

At the end of February, I got pulled over by a police officer in Oldham County, for, as best I can tell, driving my bicycle defensively.

As you may recall, I had just returned from the I am Traffic Colloquium, and while there had met Kirby Beck, who spoke to us about the role of law enforcement education in the organization we hoped to create. I had Kirby's email address due to our discussions on other things, so I asked him for suggestions as I crafted the letter I would eventually send to Oldham County. He gave me some good pointers to ponder, and included a .pdf file of this article, mentioning that it would be published "soon," but that no date had been set.

It's finally been published! It appeared in the July edition of Law and Order Magazine, and is now online so that the general public can read it.

Many of us have some idea of how we think police officers think. Some of that is stereotypes drawn from bias-confirming behavior, some from popular portrayals. Let's face it: some cops act the asshat, seemingly for the pure pleasure of acting the asshat. They may be reasonable people when not in uniform, for all we know.

The article is good reading. It might give you some ideas worth keeping in mind should you ever have to discuss your lane position with a police officer or that officer's supervisor (or further up the chain of command), or, should things really go wrong, a judge.

I don't know that I've had a lot of folks watch this video before. This is raw video from my GoPro (save that I've added some comments in text). When he opened with his "I understand that you have the right to ride on the road, but..." bit, he showed his anti-bicycle bias. A parallel sentence structure would be to say that I have the right to ride on the bus, but only in the back seat.

His claim that he "is the one that decides what goes on out here" is a fallacy argument from authority (aka bullying)--he does NOT decide what is practicable for me. Of course, a roadside argument would have led to more trouble than I wanted that day. I wasn't ready to go to court to argue my case further.

This incident led me to do a LOT more reading of KRS and KAR. If I had this happen again, I would be tempted to ask what statute the officer thinks I'm violating, so that I can better prepare after-incident comments for the officer's supervisors.