The Southwest Commuter Bike Path is the primary transportation route not only for many students, but also for many of Madison’s citizens. It is a valuable asset for its ease of access – no need to stop at traffic lights or deal with busy roads. However, on Sept. 10 at 10:51 p.m., a resident was robbed and assaulted by three teenagers on the bike path between West Doty Street and Main Street. Unfortunately, this instance is not uncommon on the commuter path, or on Madison’s many other bike paths.
According to police, the victim may have been specifically targeted, a rarity in the pattern of random attacks that have been occurring in the past few months. However, the fact remains that in the past nine months alone there were at least seven recorded instances of people being assaulted on bike paths. Any number of attacks is of course a bad thing, but this is not merely a few bad instances. Looking back at police records and news articles one can find dozens of reports of attacks on bike paths in the past several years. The many bike paths in Madison are coming to represent zones of consistent predation.
The potential for being beaten and robbed is not the worst that this situation can harbor. Anyone who drunkenly (or less likely soberly) decides to walk the bike path alone at night risks assault, robbery or worse. If there are criminals out there willing to assault and rob innocent people, consider what else they are capable of. This is bound to be a terrible and tragic incident waiting to happen.
The good news is that this can be prevented. What does it take? It is not simply a matter of awareness and taking precautions. Prudence alone is not the solution. There needs to be an active campaign undertaken by the police mepartments of Madison and policy makers in the city government and university.
According to Sgt. Cherise Caradine, the University of Wisconsin Police Department is responsible for the Lakeshore Path on which it does random bike patrols. The Madison Police Department is responsible for the Southwest Commuter Path and the rest of the bike paths in the city, but does not currently do many biking patrols. For safety’s sake, the department should incorporate biking patrols as a permanent part of operations, not just temporarily as they have been doing.
This is a policy that would not be that difficult to implement considering that the UWPD can cover one bike path, and presumably MPD could protect the others. The patrol would be easy to maintain; it would take two officers on bikes riding at 10 miles per hour (a very slow rate on a bike) roughly a half hour to patrol the entire path. With just one biking police patrol, each part of the path would see an officer at least once an hour.
There are many stretches on the bike path where one can see relatively long distances, and shouting or yelling could be easily heard and responded to by officers. However, the real strength of force behind a patrol policy is not the fact that officers will be there when a crime on the bike path takes place, but that potential criminals would start noticing police on the bike paths and start realizing the presence of patrols. This would be a major deterrent to committing a crime on bike paths.
If MPD lacks the strength in numbers to support these patrols, they need not be constant but at least frequent. The mere possibility of police patrolling on bike paths all around the city will make potential offenders think twice.
One contention that someone may raise against this proposal is that the criminals will go somewhere else to commit their crimes. We cannot change the criminal mind through public safety, but we can affect the scope and breadth of such crimes. By directly protecting some of the most vulnerable places in Madison, we can prevent and deter many would-be criminal occurrences.
Another response to this proposal is that by putting officers on the bike path we take them away from somewhere else. I have used the bike path for most of the last year at night and never once noticed a police patrol bike. Yet there are often five or more patrol cars on State Street on any given Friday or Saturday night. Instead of focusing all of the city’s police forces on a few streets near the downtown area, spare half a dozen officers to protect the least protected and most vulnerable areas.
This is not a criticism of MPD, but rather a suggestion on how to protect against more serious crime. The focus of the Police should shift to protecting not only the well-lit roads of State Street, but also to protecting the dark bike paths where real criminals are preying on the good people of Madison.
Matt Jeffers ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in philosophy and economics.
