Before the last Friday in July, San Francisco photographer Bennett Hall didn't know squat about bicycling in his city. In fact, he was so out of the biking loop that he had barely been aware of a 5-year-old cycling ritual called Critical Mass.
In June, the well-connected gallery owner had his first introduction to the Mass as he sat savoring a slab of Sonoma range-fed pork and gazing out a restaurant window. He saw several thousand riders pedal peacefully down the Embarcadero, the city's waterfront boulevard.
But it wasn't until 25 July, when Hall was arrested in a chaotic police attempt to control the ride, that he really got up close and personal with the Mass. "Before then, I didn't know anything about biking issues," he said. "I'd never ride a bike in San Francisco. I'd get killed or crumpled in a heartbeat."
Now, however, he's at the heart of the controversy surrounding last month's incident. Given the treatment he says police subjected him to, he has been eager to take center stage. And on the Internet, Hall has found the perfect platform from which to launch his crusade for cycling justice.
"I've been screwed at the hands of people who were supposed to protect me," says Hall, who, with police cooperation, founded and now runs a downtown neighborhood patrol called City Center Partnership. "There's no way I'm going to go home and shut up about this."
Hall was arrested after he ran down from his studio to photograph a police-cyclist face-off at a nearby intersection. Police contend that Hall tried to hit a cop with his camera, a charge the photographer scoffs at. "What professional photographer in his right mind would attack a cop with a $4,000 camera?" he asks.
Police maintain that the arrests were justified.
Upon his release from jail, Hall scuttled home and, in a fit of righteous indignation, logged onto the Internet, where he set out to learn everything he could about Critical Mass. "I did a Yahoo search and pulled up everything I could," he says. "Then I signed on to a mailing list. Within 72 hours, I had 300 emails in my inbox, all jabbering about what had happened."
Enter Ken McCarthy, one of the founders of e-media and a regular Critical Mass participant. "I rode that Friday night, and everything was cool," says McCarthy. "Then I went home and started seeing reports about all this violence on other routes."
Eager to find out what was happening, McCarthy left his apartment and, stopping to buy a disposable camera, went to Market Street to snap pictures. Later that night he began posting them on his Web site. The he queried members of a local biking listserv about what had happened.
As responses streamed in, among them an account from Hall, McCarthy began to believe that, contrary to mainstream press accounts, cyclists weren't entirely responsible for what was typically portrayed as an evening of biker mayhem. And he set out to create a record of what the press had missed.
The result, a damning compilation of firsthand accounts and photographs sent in response to a call for evidence of police misconduct, would have been impossible without the Web, says McCarthy.
"Without the Web, all anyone would have been able to do would be walk around and say, 'What happened?'" he says. "And the only answer we would have had would be what the press, mayor, and police said: A bunch of cyclists went on a crazy. As it is, we've been able to create a multisource, comprehensive, documented account of what happened."
Hall agrees. "Without the Web, this story really would have been buried in the media," he says. "Now it's resurfaced. The San Francisco Examiner finally broke it. A ton of their information came from the Web."
