On a Roll : In Some U.S. Cities, Bike-Riding Police Are Making a Difference

Silent as the night, the two cops were on the men before they knew what was happening. Their bicycles made no noise as they sped along the muddy path under the viaduct.

They surprised three prowlers who were watching, from a distance, unsuspecting motorists putting their valuables in car trunks. The prowlers had not yet zeroed in on a good mark in the parking lot, so officers Debbie Brooks and Steve Kilberg found only a hefty screwdriver on them, the kind that could be used to pop open a trunk. They told the trio to keep walking.

Five minutes later, the officers arrested a man as he was about to inject cocaine into his arm as he sat amid the filth so much a part of life under the viaduct--and consequently the life of Seattle’s bike cops.

There were broken bottles and mud-covered remnants of clothing. The guy with the needle had heated his cocaine on the peeled-off bottom of an aluminum can. He was little more than a kid, but the bike cops had had many dealings with him before.

With their prisoner in handcuffs, Brooks and Kilberg wheeled their mountain bikes out to the street, where they waited for the paddy wagon. While they were there, two other bike cops, Vic Maes and Al Lopez, appeared at the top of the hill.

Now that’s a pair, Maes and Lopez: Maes is the serious one when he’s on the street looking for the pushers and dealers he knows by their first names; Lopez is a bodybuilder with a soft voice and an eye for the ladies. Many is the time Maes has looked back to find his bike partner talking to a pretty woman somewhere down the street.

These are four of Seattle’s bike cops, and this is the city where mountain bikes were first used to go after crooks. What started with two officers making rounds in 1987 has evolved into 28 “cycle cops” citywide.

They began in rudimentary sartorial fashion, using rubber bands around their legs to keep their pants from being caught in the chain. But the uniform quickly became cycling shorts, special lightweight shoes, and, of course, rain gear. This is Seattle, after all.

Using bicycles on the beat isn’t exactly new. English bobbies rode them. Police in the California beach communities have employed them for work on the boardwalk.

But it was the trick of using mountain bikes, machines designed to go most anywhere, that made police on bikes people to be reckoned with.

They can dart down alleys and stairs, zip across parks and up hills. They can slither through heavy traffic and go the wrong way on a one-way street. And they are so quiet that many a criminal has found himself staring at a badge in the middle of an illegal transaction.

Paul Grady, one of the officers who dreamed up the bike idea, said he has received queries from almost 200 police departments around the world on how to start a cycling squad. He wrote a how-to manual on bike patrols and sold 50 of them in two weeks at $44.50 a pop.

Police departments nationwide, from Hollywood, Fla., to Sacramento, Calif., now have or are planning bike patrols. They have grown so popular that bike cops from around the nation converged on Seattle recently for their own mini-Olympics, which Seattle, by the way, won.

It was fitting that the first competition was here, where the bike cops began and have flourished in a city that is a cyclist’s nirvana.

Seattle recently was rated by Bicycling magazine as the best place in the nation to practice the sport.

“It’s just taken off across the country,” said Grady, who has been transferred from the bike patrol as he pursues his sergeant’s stripes. “It’s incredible.”

In Salt Lake City, there are plans to almost double the bike force this year, from 8 to 14. The New York borough of Queens has them, as does the upscale Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park. In Chicago, burglaries were up last year--except in places where there were cops on bikes. And in Tampa, Fla., police use bikes to roam high-crime public housing projects. Boston recently began a bike program, and the Sacramento Police Department has put all its downtown foot patrolmen on bikes.

“I think bike patrols will become standard in the future,” said Sacramento Police Sgt. Kent Thorpe. “They did it in London a long time ago and now it’s coming back into style, except updated with mountain bikes.”

So popular is the cop on a bike concept that consulting with other departments has become almost a full-time job for Grady. He takes vacation time to train others.

There are small drawbacks, such as a hefty amount of needling from fellow officers and the need for assistance once an arrest is made. “You’re not going to arrest people and then put them on your handlebars,” Grady said.

Brooks and Kilberg were back at the station filling out paper work, and Maes and Lopez were on the street. Only a few blocks away is the Pike Street Market, one of the major destinations for tourists and locals alike. Fresh fish is piled high, as are vegetables. Stalls of handiwork and T-shirts line the sidewalk.

Maes and Lopez worked the streets a few blocks away, where life takes a serious plunge. They call it the “cesspool” and the “pit.” It’s where drug deals go down in the alleys and muggers cruise, looking for prey.

Maes and Lopez know the street people by their first names. They know what they’re doing and what they’re selling. The two cops cruised the alleys, pointing to small piles where ends of balloons had been cut off. (Cocaine and crack cocaine are stuffed in balloons, which then are knotted before the ends are cut off, the better to swallow them if they see cops about to move in.)

Maes and Lopez don’t see this scene in quite the same way. Maes is the driven one always looking for the bust. He stops known addicts on the street and makes them open their mouths to see whether balloons are hidden inside. Lopez sometimes tires of the territory, of seeing the same lost faces day after day: “Sometimes, it just gets old.”

After a lunch of beef teriyaki, they swung up the street and around the corner, just in time to see a man and woman get out of a car. The man rolled his eyes when he saw Maes and Lopez; the couple are addicts who have had many run-ins with the bike cops.

“Man, I swear: We just came down to get our bus passes,” the man said.

“Sure,” Maes replied. “Sure. Where’d you get the car?”

“We just borrowed it from a friend,” the man said as Maes pulled out his citation book. Maes eventually charged him with driving without a license, although he could have hit him with much more.

But before he had finished writing the ticket, the couple was talking about how they had tried to stay clean, how they had really tried.

Lopez listened to the woman intently.

“I got cleaned up and dirty again, cleaned up and dirty again,” she said, sobbing.

“You need to get some help,” Lopez said. The woman shook her head in assent.

“We tried,” the man said. “But we screwed up. We’re really stupid.”

Down another alley. More balloons. Two kids, one fat, one thin, standing behind a trash bin, obviously intent on cutting a drug deal. Maes frisked the thin one and found a homemade hash pipe. He pushed the thin one up to the wall and lectured him about how stupid he was to be in the area. “People die on this street,” he told the kid. “People die on that stairway.”

Then he put the pipe on the alley and crushed it with the heel of his shoe.

Cruising again. Maes and Lopez swung by an abandoned building, where addicts live at times.

This day, something was different. There was a sheet over a window. The cops rode to the back of the building, where the rear lot was littered with junk--old wire fence, rotting lumber, bricks.

Maes took the point and Lopez covered, walking stealthily on rotting boards, up a flight of stairs and into the putrid room where the addict lived.

He was there and offered no resistance. A paint can was on the floor, filled with urine and feces.

“Sometimes it’s a lot worse,” Maes said. “Sometimes they just pick a room and designate it as the toilet.”

Brooks and Kilberg rode up just as the squad car was pulling away. They chatted before the call came over the radios attached to their shirts. Two crack dealers were peddling their wares on a street about a mile away. The four of them moved quickly through traffic, darting around a bus and lines of cars.

Two dealers started running in opposite directions when they saw the bike cops. Maes and Lopez went west. Brooks and Kilberg went east. Both got their man. It was no contest.

It was late afternoon and the dark clouds were rolling in off Puget Sound.

The sprinkles turned to a downpour as the cops headed for the station to do the worst part of police work: the paper work.

The question had been raised several times about what they could point to as proof they were having a real effect on the neighborhood.

Kilberg came up with the yellow coat anecdote, referring to the color of the rain gear used by the bike cops.

“When the street criminals see a messenger with a yellow coat on, they start throwing their dope away,” he said. “All statistics aside, you know you’re doing good.”