Cycles of change

The cop

by Jason Gay

When Sergeant Paul Sugrue first hopped on a mountain bike five years ago, many of his colleagues in the Cambridge Police Department had themselves a pretty good chuckle. "A lot of them laughed, just like the public did," the barrel-chested police veteran recalls. "They didn't take it very seriously."

But they don't laugh anymore -- not with Sugrue leading a full-time crew of Cambridge bike officers who now rank among the region's oldest and most accomplished cycle patrols. Every day, Cambridge sends at least two officers out on bikes to perform everything from rider safety training for children to traffic stops and undercover drug investigations.

"When we first started out, we were supposed to be just out there doing community relations," Sugrue says. "But now we're assisting patrol cars wherever we can. And there are a lot of times when our bicycles are the first on the scene."

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The commuter
The couriers
The competitor

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Bicycle cops are an outgrowth of community policing, the back-to-the-beat philosophy that has revitalized the connection between departments and their neighborhoods in the past decade. But cycle advocates say that bike patrols also legitimize cycling as a useful, important form of transportation: the theory is that if people see officers riding bikes on the job, then bikes will be taken more seriously as a way to get around.

"I think the proliferation of bicycle police forces is one of the best [developments] we have seen," says John Crisley, president of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. "The whole philosophy behind community policing is to re-engage the public with their police force -- and the fact that police are using bicycles to do it tells you how bikes re-engage you with the neighborhood."

Indeed, the central aim of bicycle patrols is community contact: getting police officers out of their cruisers and into the neighborhoods, where they mingle with residents, especially children. All the Cambridge bike officers carry McDonald's gift certificates, which they distribute to kids they see wearing protective helmets; the department also fixes up recovered bicycles and gives them away to kids in need. "And we've taught every grammar-school student in the city a half-hour course on bike safety," Sugrue says.

Though a police officer on a bicycle seems friendlier than one in a cruiser, bikes also provide a substantial law-enforcement advantage, says Sugrue. In addition to their maneuverability in crowded and narrow areas, bicycles provide the kind of stealth that a vehicle cannot. Cambridge bike officers regularly make arrests for street-level drug dealing, Sugrue says, often breaking up an in-progress transaction before either the buyer or the seller even realizes what is happening.

"They don't see you coming and they don't hear you coming," says Sugrue, who rode a cruiser at night for his first 12 years on the force. He recalls several incidents when bike officers surprised dealers at Columbia Street Park, in North Cambridge. "We can come from places where they're not expecting us, and it's not immediately apparent that we are police officers," he says.

In response to complaints from neighborhood and public officials, Cambridge's uniformed bikers have also started cracking down on their civilian counterparts. Officers have been handing out tickets to cyclists who violate traffic laws while riding. "There's been a mixed reaction so far," Sugrue says. "You have some people who are just like motor-vehicle drivers -- they ask us, `Don't you have something better to do?' "

But it's always the drivers who are the most shocked to get pulled over by a police officer on a bike. Sugrue recalls chasing a driver who'd made a traffic violation through a series of back roads and neighborhoods, siren blasting and blue lights flashing on his handlebars, before finally pulling him over on Mass Ave. "The guy said he never saw that I was behind him," Sugrue says. "Yeah, right."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.