popeye

https://www.bicycling.com/news/a3091...cling-florida/

If there were no witnesses this kid would have been .......

OUGrad05

They should have stopped especially if it's known to be monitored by officers looking for cyclists but this is a massive over reaction from the LEO.

bruce19

That cop was a dick.

bampilot06

When I was a kid and rode bmx, I would ride my bike everywhere and I never thought stop signs applied to me. When I started cycling this year I had the same attitude, and didn’t even realize I was in the wrong. I will say I don’t understand why I would need to come to a stop and un clip when there is no traffic coming from either direction. To me that seems over kill and a waste of my time.

Digger Goreman

Especially when the majority of freakin motor vehicles don't eiither!


Let me add Orlando to the places that don't need my vacation dollars.

BengalCat

If the cop truly yelled stop and thought the riders ignored him what follows is not only not surprising but expected as something likely to happen.
He won't be convicted of the charge. It will just be dropped outright or more likely to be dropped on the condition of pleading guilty to running a stop sign.

Velo Vol 

Velo Vol 

--Pretty dumb by the cyclist to cruise through the intersection when the sheriff is standing right there. That said, it was obviously uncalled for to put the cyclist in handcuffs. WTF

--One time a policeman saw me roll through a red light (he was behind me and I didn't realize it). He put on his lights, but not the siren. I just happened to pull off the road right before turning onto an MUP, otherwise I might have missed him altogether. Anyway, he gave me a short warning and I was on my way.

BengalCat

OK, now I've heard the audio. The arrested cyclist and the other cyclists did a poor job of communicating their "defense" to the cop. Very poor. Cop's behavior was reasonable in real-time under the circumstances. I still think the final outcome will be the serious charge of resisting arrest and whatever "fleeing" is will be dropped and the worse case outcome is a ticket for failure to stop at the stop sign.

GrainBrain

Meh I'm not buying that this should have happened with the kid in handcuffs and booked. A ticket? Sure. Resisting arrest!? No way, officer should've understood the initial confusion. Kids on bikes in full team kit getting treated like someone who just eluded in a motor vehicle doing 90? Gimme a break.

datlas 

Cop could have written them up for running the stop sign. The rest seems too harsh.

bikemig 

The cop said this is a felony. That must be a very slow town if this is the kind of felony we need cops for.

alo

I think police performance is measured by how many people they book. When they have not got enough, they start booking people for very trivial things. Sometimes they make up false charges.

Police should be after the real criminals.

bahula03

Having watched the videos and read through the article, that is 100% the police officer imposing the power they're entrusted with to intimidate the people they're supposed to protect. What an embarrassment.

BengalCat

Lighten up, folks!

The cop was arresting him for failure to obey or respond to his communication to stop. He was not arrested or charged with resisting arrest. He was simply warned not to resist. Notice the cop is not angry, belligerent or hotheaded.

The kid was handcuffed, not because it is legally required, but because when a police officer arrests someone it is a routine procedure for the cop's protection and to a certain extent at times the arrestees. However, it is a discretionary decision. ​​​​​​Refusing to stop for police or evading a police officer is the criminal act of not stopping when told to by a police officer. It does not matter whether the police officer verbally instructs a person to stop or flashes their lights.

A person can be charged with misdemeanor eluding police that is punishable by six months in county jail and/or $1,000 fine, or they could be charged with a felony. The type of evading police felony that a person is charged with depends on the facts of the case.

In the end, nothing serious is going to happen to the kid. He is likely just going to be ticketed for failure to stop at the stop sign.

bahula03

I appreciate your jovial attitude towards this, but I've gotta ask- if the end result is a ticket for rolling the stop sign, why not just do that and call it a day? Does the difference between a basic "hey, you ran a stop sign so I'm going to have to give you a ticket" conversation, and arresting someone, threatening them with a felony, having them spend seven hours in jail, and forcing their family to scramble for bail money not register for you?

bpcyclist

Typical complete lack of cop judgment to place the overall situation into some kind of sensible, rasonable world context. Concrete, small-minded thinking. Or, non-thinking, rather. When law enforcement officers and prosecutors exercise their absolutely incalculabe power without employing commensurate good judgement, almost without excception, very bad things happen.

JohnDThompson 

Some states have adopted the "Idaho Stop" that allows cyclists to treat stop signs as "yield" signs, and traffic lights like stop signs.

"The Idaho Stop, first passed in 1982, has been shown to have pretty significant safety benefits. Bicycle injuries dropped 14 percent in Idaho the year following its passage. A 2010 study by Berkeley researcher Jason Meggs found bike safety was about 30 percent better in Idaho cities than comparable peers."

BengalCat

Pay attention. You are claiming "facts that are not in evidence" and or you have no knowledge are true. (Spending time in jail, needing to get bail money is just wild speculation by you that given what we do know so far is more likely false than true in this case. Also, he was arrested for failing to stop not, as far as we know, for running a stop sign.)

He didn't "threaten" anyone with a felony. He simply pointed out what under the law could be a felony. (See my last post that specifically addresses that.)

The whole episode at this point from what we have seen and heard, and we believe it, happened due to just one big misunderstanding.

GreenAnvil

I saw a stop sign for the road that the cop was on... but not for the direction that the cyclists were coming from. The road just turns left.

Did I miss the sign? Is it really in the video?

Chad991

Are we watching the same video? That guy was a dick. I know that not a lot of people believe this but even on a nice road bike, full kit in a pace line, you still gotta obey the traffic laws. He didn't think so, he was wrong. The gathering crowd yelling at the cop probably didn't help. If he woulda just stopped, was polite,I imagine this would have went very differently.

GreenAnvil

I’m not sure if this is on a different video. On the video I saw, there is NO STOP SIGN on the side of the road FROM THE DIRECTION THE RIDERS ARE COMING FROM, PRIOR to the intersection. The stop sign from the officer’s video is for the side road the cop is on that intersects the road the cyclists are on at the curve. If there is a stop sign. can someone please point that out to me. I’ll check again and if so I’ll edit my response.

GreenAnvil

Ok, just checked the two videos again. There is NO STOP SIGN for the cyclists that they supposedly ran. That stop sign in the video is for traffic coming from the side road were the cops were parked.

AdkMtnMonster

The cops that go after the "real criminals" work in a department called Internal Affairs.

WhyFi

I take it you didn't read the accompanying article?