Originally Posted by wphamilton

What I saw was officers haranguing them about bike licenses which, ordinance or no, they had no legitimate authority to. I wouldn't have gotten mouthy, but only because I'm older and wiser and know how that turns out. These are kids, being wronged by authority - backtalk should be expected.

If they're too unruly, just warn them off. The cops got that wrong also, because most of what they were doing was no big deal. Just the idea, the nerve of those kids, taking up the street was the gist of it. But that wasn't what the cops acted on; they acted on the license issue. You're implying that it was a pretext for the cop's disruption and heavy handed result, a pretext because they didn't or couldn't cite "riding like jerks". I'd tend to agree that it did look like they used the (probably illegal) ordinance as a pretext for punishing the kids.