White Privilege, on a Bicycle

[thelakelander]

The perils of "biking while black" came into sharp focus this month.

SARAH GOODYEAR

The other night, I was at a small party where I brought up the idea of bicycle registration. Should bicycle owners, I asked the man next to me, be required to register their bicycles with the police?

His answer was a firm and unequivocal yes. In his opinion, bicycles should be registered so that their owners could be held accountable for their actions and any injuries they might cause.

Then I told my friend about the situation in Fort Lauderdale, where a no-fee bike registration law was implemented in 2003, requiring every bike owned by a city resident to be registered with the cops. There, the program has been touted not as a means of holding cyclists accountable for crashes or law-breaking, but as a theft-prevention measure: according to the Florida city's website, "a bicycle registration program is vital to the safety and well being of every resident in our community."

In practice, I told the pro-registration guy, it seems the requirement is enforced in a heavily lopsided manner against the city's African American residents. According to the Miami New Times, the Broward County public defender has accused the Fort Lauderdale police department of unconstitutional racial profiling in enforcement of the ordinance, and the paper's investigation in late 2013 revealed that 86 percent of the 460 citations issued over the previous three years were issued to black people. (Just 31 percent of the city's population is African American.)

Full article: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/01/white-privilege-on-a-bicycle/384634/