Victims Share Tales of SFPD Anti-Bike Bias and Hostility at City Hall

When Sarah Harling was hospitalized by a minivan driver who made a left turn into her at a stop sign intersection, she says the SFPD officer who filed the police report included a fabricated statement from her claiming that she "approached the stop sign without stopping."

Harling said she tried to submit a response to the numerous "factual errors" in the police report, but an officer at SFPD's Richmond Station "raised his voice to lecture me about how traffic laws apply to cyclists too, how he'd never let his children ride bikes in the city, and then told me repeatedly, 'I'm not telling you you can't leave this here, but you just need to understand that sometimes things get lost.'"

"I left the station in tears," she said.

Harling later hired an attorney, who collected witness statements and a photo, which showed the driver to be at fault and led the driver's insurance company to settle for his or her maximum amount of coverage available.

"To say that the San Francisco Police Department failed to investigate my crash is not quite accurate. Rather, they refused to. Repeatedly," said Harling. "I got the message, again and again, that because I had been riding my bicycle, it was my fault."

Harling was one of dozens of bicycle riders who shared stories of hostile encounters with San Francisco police at a hearing held by a Board of Supervisors committee last week, testifying to what appears to be an anti-bike bias among many officers when it comes to investigating conflicts and crashes between people driving and biking.

"It's not everyone in the force, but there is a systemic problem among police department officers when it comes to treating people fairly and equally who are biking and walking," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the SF Bicycle Coalition. "We have regular accounts of people who are treated, at best, unprofessionally, and at worst, unjustly."

The hearing comes after the fumbled investigation of the death of 24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac, who was run over by a truck driver at Folsom and Sixth Streets in August. SFPD investigators apparently didn't bother to ask nearby businesses if they had surveillance footage of the crash, though an SFBC staffer found it within 10 minutes. After seeing the  footage, SFPD found the truck driver at fault. Although the SFPD has said it submitted the case to the district attorney to examine for charges, the current status of the case is unclear.

At the memorial and rally held for Le Moullac, immediately after which the SFBC found the footage, SFPD Sergeant Richard Ernst parked his cruiser in the Folsom bike lane to make a point that the onus is on bicycle riders to pass to the left of right-turning cars. Ernst declared all three victims who have been killed this year to be at fault, including 48-year-old Diana Sullivan, who was sitting stopped at a red light at King and Third Streets in March when a trucker ran her over.

Such stories are reported regularly by victims who say officers have automatically assumed they were at fault in crashes, made false claims about bicycling and traffic laws, and even made threats. In one such story reported by Streetsblog in March 2012, a couple bicycling on Oak Street along the Wiggle (before the existing bike lane was installed) was harassed by a driver who injured one of the victims. The officer who responded at the scene threatened to throw the bleeding victim in jail for "vandalizing the vehicle."