Trek Urged To Divest From Police Business After Bicycles Used Against Black Lives Matter Protestors

Trek Bikes is coming under increasing pressure to divest from supplying bicycles to U.S. police forces. This follows the publication of photographs and videos of bike cops using Trek-branded bicycles to subjugate, threaten, and hit protestors on Black Lives Matter marches.

Fuji, another major supplier of police bikes, withdrew from the rarefied market last week saying, “violence with bicycles is unacceptable.”

Trek CEO John Burke told me on June 3 that his company supports the “peaceful protest of police brutality and inequality and [opposes] any unlawful action by any citizen including police.”

Burke is expected to make a further statement on the issue on June 8.

The family-owned Wisconsin-based business has been pilloried on social media for maintaining its police contracts during the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a U.S. police officer in Minneapolis.

The supposedly “humble” bicycle—usually a symbol of non-motorized meekness—is being used by America’s militarized law enforcement as a mix between a riot shield and a baton.

“Bicycles are one of the most beautiful inventions in the history of the word,” said Peter Flax, former editor in chief of Bicycling magazine, “and so to see them being deployed so widely as another weapon in police arsenals has dealt a serious blow to bike culture.”

He added: “I think this is a moment to stand up and declare this is not what we want the bicycle to represent.”

The Los-Angeles-based journalist believes it’s bad business for big bike brands to continue supplying police forces.

“I want to hear CEOs condemn this use, and I think they’d be wise to weigh the incremental revenue versus the strong outrage—actually the heartbreak—that many consumers feel seeing bicycles used in this fashion,” he told me by email.

“Bike consumers have always made purchasing decisions based as much on the narrative of brands as the quality of their products,” Flax continued.

“The American public remains divided on issues around the role of police, but I think there’s more to lose by inaction at this moment than there is to gain. This is now about optics as much as it about economics.”

Both optics and economics are combined in the nascent #BoycottTrek movement on social media.

“Although Trek Bikes have been the most visible in police bike brutality, we know that the bike industry on a whole is complicit in [the] racist system of policing,” claims a Change-org petition urging the cycling industry to get out of the police supply business.

The petition urges consumers to use “spending power to demand that the cycling industry divests from police contracts.”

Now with nearly 4,000 signatures, the petition claims that bicycles are “tools of freedom that give riders agency through mobility, and empowerment through human-powered transit” and that it’s “hypocrisy” for the bike industry to supply “tools [used] against peaceful protest.”

“If,” continues the petition, “the cycling industry is truly taking an oath of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, we cannot stand for police assaulting and brutalizing protesters with their bikes.”

As well as Trek, the petition calls out bike supplier Haro, helmet brand Bell, lock and bike lights brand Kryptonite, and electric motor brand Bosch.

“I’m sad that so much of the attention on this issue is being directed at Trek specifically,” said Flax, “but it’s their logo that’s most visible on bicycle downtubes in disturbing videos and images depicting police brutality in U.S. cities. The company has done so many authentic things right in the last 10 or 15 years to build the image of a brand that cares about the right things—equity, advocacy, and philanthropy, for instance. So to watch the company look paralyzed on this is painful.”

The divest-from-police-contracts petition was started by Twitter user “BikeDefund,” who has told me, “we have a network of people all over working on this and we are being guided by a BIPOC [Black, indigenous, and people of color] collective.”

“BikeDefund” said that the chances of Trek divesting from the police supply business are “pretty high.”