Having won the battle for bike lanes in the city, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's dwindling membership wants to make sure you don't accidentally get a minority killed by the cops. So, think twice about reporting bike theft, comrades!

No, I'm not kidding — and I'll ask you to please bear with me on this one, because there's a little Tuesday morning philosophizing ahead. Although before we really get into this, let me remind you that most cyclists — and we've got a million of them around here — have commendable road manners. It's only the minority that you want to gently (?) nudge into a gully with your right-front bumper.

So it all started on one of those accidental deep dives, spurred by a funny tweet by one of those urban cycling enthusiasts: tech guy Grant Slatton.

You don't have to be a cyclist to feel serious empathy for Grant's predicament. If you're a conservative and you've voted in almost any election for the past 30 years or so, you feel his pain deep in your bones. Besides, even if some local bike organization were founded by conservatives, it wouldn't be long before the group was taken over by lefties waging war against cars.

Grant's complaint about having his bike stolen led me to the SFBC's home page, where the group "strongly urge[s] everyone to consider the potential impact of calling the police on this person’s life."

It isn't the bike thief's responsibility to consider any potential impacts, apparently, even if some of them are black or brown:

Black and brown people are often deeply harmed or even killed by interactions with the police, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition decided in 2020 to end any formal relationship with SFPD. Because policing is interwoven into nearly all current solutions to bike theft, some of our recommendations do involve minimal contact with the police, but we identify those and try to propose alternatives. We encourage everyone to consider the potential impact to human life of involving the police in any situation. 

SBFC said its "recommendations generally avoid involving the police whenever possible to minimize harm to Black and brown people."

It's a short path from winning on bike lanes to becoming social-justice scolds, and even in the super-left Bay Area, the San Francisco Standard reported that the group's membership has dwindled from 12,000 to just 6,000. 

Looks like at least half the group was happy to get their bike lanes and report the occasional bike thief to the authorities — no matter what color the thief might be.

No organization — certainly not a nonprofit working with Other People's Money — ever hit its goals, declared victory, and closed up shop. Achieving its goals is just the first step to inevitable mission creep.

But back to where we started on all this: Something Ayn Rand called "the sanction of the victim."

Leftism's necessary moral inversions require that criminals be given every opportunity (and then some), and that non-criminals be treated as suspect. That's how it became a racist act to report a theft. It's probably doubleplusungood racist to jail the thief.

Whether it's refusing to report a stolen bike because of some nearly imaginary risk of getting a black or brown person killed, or submitting to an automated physical examination every time you get behind the wheel of a new car, you're giving sanction to the idea that the victim of theft, or the cautious driver, is somehow too dangerous to be trusted.

"Guilty until proven innocent" is one of the Left's most potent tools for gaining power over other people. Once you've got them feeling guilty over reporting a criminal act, they'll submit to most anything. 

The thing about the sanction of the victim, as Rand also pointed out, is that the victim can withdraw their sanction anytime they choose. That's why I was so amused by Slatton's follow-up post, where he joked, "I support the compromise policy in which we use the ground up bones of bike thieves as mortar for the bike lanes."

That's hardly what you'd expect from a Bay Area tech guy, and maybe a sign that people are getting tired of being treated as guilty until proven innocent.

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