It's okay to be a certain type of hooligan
There's a video going around of a Mercedes driving extremely dangerously through a crowd of young people on bikes in Los Angeles. This person gets into a bunch of near-deadly near-crashes with the kids, swerves dangerously, drives on the opposite side of the road, etc. People are saying that after the video, the kids did chase the car down and damage it. There's another video that seems like it's showing that particular incident, anyway.
This precise thing - driver and bike kids get into a fight, bike kids bust up the car - has happened several times in the last year or so in LA and we occasionally do get driver-sympathetic news writeups about it. Teens and young adults biking in huge crowds isn't particularly rare in LA - it's not something you see every day, but it's something you can see monthly, depending on where you live.
The thing is, adults do this, too. I frequently join group rides of 20 or more cyclists who zoom around the city - mostly the west side. Honestly, we're doing it for the same reason the kids do: it is simply fun to roll around. We might use the road more safely than they do, but there really isn't too much of a difference between what we're doing and what they're doing.
In fact, almost all the "hooligan" stuff that kids do on rides like these, adults do as well - but when we do it, it doesn't seem anywhere near as threatening to the people watching us.
Critical Mass rides, for instance, often involve a certain amount of debauchery. There are always plenty of adults on that ride who are mysteriously able to summon magical cans of beer at the halfway point. There are moments in these rides where cyclists take up the entire width of the street, surround cars, and impede traffic. But because these people are biking with fairy lights and flags and audio systems on their bikes, people receive this kind of behavior with an indulgence they do not grant to teens - even when the teens aren't actually destroying anything. Adults at Critical Mass perform the kind of ceremonially festive behaviors which allow their bike ride to be received as 'adults having a bit of fun.'
Cars drivers will get angry when we take up half of Olympic, like the kids do in this video - but they just get angry, and then they move on with their day. They do not use that anger to go home and post grand theories about our criminality on social media. Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of people speaking this way about groups of teens on bikes - including about the teens in the exact video I shared above.
When it comes to danger, I've personally done some of the more outrageously dangerous stuff the kids do, too. Last year, a group of teens and young adults biked onto the freeway during rush hour - certainly extraordinarily dangerous, particularly in the place where they did it. But on one group ride I did last year, my group biked on the freeway for one exit - in a context where we had to bike on the freeway's large shoulder in order to get off of a small island. If I tell that story, I can make the claim that we had to do it to get off the island, and people will say, "Ah, okay, you are not necessarily a responsible adult, but you aren't a criminal."
But one of the thoughts that passed through my mind as I did this was: damn! Now I'm like those kids who sometimes take a group ride on the freeway!!
And consider this: when a roadie in lycra bikes between LA and San Diego - a great feat of strength anyone at their office would cheer them for - they must currently bike for eight miles on the freeway, because the military base Camp Pendleton has been closed to cyclists since 2020.
In LA, there isn't a single thing that the kids on bikes do that indulgently-forgiven adults do not also do, also often in groups of the same tremendous size.
You'll often see people online who claim that these big teen bike groups only come together in order to do smash and grabs on stores, but the people who claim this are so ignorant that they generally do not even know that LA area bicycle group ride culture even exists. Adults gather in large, rowdy groups to ride bikes for fun... and kids don't? Is there some switch that flips between childhood and adulthood which causes people to only become interested in riding bikes for fun once they turn 21... and before that, it's crime only? These kids attend some of the group rides adults organize. I've biked with kids like this. The first Critical Mass of the summer usually has many hundreds of people attending, and loads of them are teens. Teens bike for fun all the fucking time.
The way teens organize their rides also earns a shade of criminality and suspicion that adults - doing the same thing - avoid. Smaller group rides in LA are often organized by a single person who makes a post on social media, inviting strangers to meet up and ride around with them. Your average adult would choose to organize a group ride in this way. When kids do it, however, adults often choose to describe this same behavior in purely sinister tones.
When rhetoric about crime enters the conversation, you also really gotta start paying attention to the race of the kids who are usually filmed doing this stuff. The videos you see are usually of Black and Latino teens - the groups of young, wealthy white kids riding ebikes dangerously in Santa Monica usually don't get the same kind of attention. You also have to think very critically about people who post as if any group of kids on bicycles are a functional organization or working in some kind of intentional, coordinated way.
Instead, when you see a video like this, you really do have to give the kids grace and look at what they're actually doing. In the original video I shared above, they are not not smashing up a store or even smashing up a car: they are simply riding a vehicle on the road. And another road user is threatening their lives over it.
Driving your car like this near a cyclist is like brandishing a gun at them. It's really exactly that threatening and dangerous.
There is no universe where I would look at a group of kids like this and think to start my response with, "well, I understand getting mad at them." Do you? Do you really feel that mad at these kids? Would you brandish a gun at them over this? I've been threatened in the same way - most recently during the Marathon Crash Ride in 2023, around 3 AM, when a car drove at speed through a group of cyclists riding on the (closed to cars) LA Marathon route and passed about three feet away from me. I do not "understand" getting that mad about having to drive slowly behind cyclists for a minute. I never will. It's deranged, murderous behavior. I'm glad to call it criminal.
These kids probably had no expectation that a cop would do anything to defend them. (Which may be why they followed the guy into a parking lot and stomped on the hood of his car.) The fact that they can expect no protection from power is precisely the reason why bike advocates really do have to fight at the margins - in the places, and for the lives whose worth is most questioned by society. You have to be willing to demand decency for the hundreds of thousands of kids out there who are performing hooligan-coded behaviors, because a lot of those behaviors are only "sinister" in the context of youth and class and race. The kids in this video are doing precisely the same thing that adults in the city do every single month, doing it just as dangerously as adults sometimes do, using the same techniques for promotion, and probably doing it for the same reasons. They may break the law more brazenly, but absent some kind of city-wide youth group ride census, I'm not at all certain that they break the law often.
If you want roads to be safe for people to bike safely, you have to be willing to demand protection from death for the kids who fill the entire roadway. The best future for bikes in this city is not one where kids like this are more swiftly punished - it's one where the driver never touches a wheel again. Because last month, precisely this exact thing happened, too, but the kids who were being threatened tried to escape into a parking lot, and then the driver chased them in and killed one of them.
This really is life or death shit. You really do have to defend these kids' lives.