UC Bike Cops Riding Tall in Competition

A team from the University of Cincinnati Police Department’s bike patrol proved their mettle on their pedals, bringing home top honors in a skills challenge involving 15 police agencies from across southwest Ohio.

UC Police have 34 officers who are certified as bike cops. The team of Rob Gutierrez and Mike Blake, representing UC Police, placed first in August in the Hamilton County Police Association and Great Oaks Police Academy 2005 "Police on Bikes" Challenge.

They competed on their mountain bikes against other two-man teams across a course that included a sprint section, cones, an obstacle course and a shooting course. The obstacle course included tests such as going up and down stairs, over teeter-totters, and riding across a balance beam-like plank. The shooting course came at the end, when the competitors were fatigued, with penalty time added if they were not accurate in their aim.

The UC officers beat all their competition by at least a 30-second margin.

"This was something that, in all honesty, we weren’t really expecting to win," says Gutierrez, "especially when we saw how many people were there and how familiar they were with the competition. So it was very nice to win. For a while, our bike program hasn’t had a lot of direction to it, so this was good."

The bike program looked towards continuing its growth beginning this summer, when Lt. Jeff Thompson took over as supervisor.

"(Winning) makes a nice beginning statement for us," Thompson says. "It is the first competition we’ve been in since the program has been re-emphasized. We’re trying to show people we are here, and this is one more step to increasing our visibility."

Actually, the bike program itself is one of the department’s best vehicles for establishing visibility around campus. With so little of the interior of UC’s West Campus being open to vehicular traffic, patrols on bikes allow UC officers to both be easily accessible to students and faculty and still cover large amounts of territory quickly when necessary.

"You are able to interact a lot more with people on campus," says Gutierrez. "On the bike, you are seen as a lot more approachable, especially in a campus setting. And I’m active, so I like that part of it. It’s a better way to patrol a lot of areas on our campus."

"We are trying to increase the approachability and visibility of our officers," Thompson says. "We have visibility goals we’re striving towards, and bike patrols help us to achieve those."

It can also offer unique advantages to an officer’s patrol efforts.

"One thing you can do on a bike is you can sneak up on people sometimes," says Gutierrez. When you’re in a cruiser with a light bar on top, no one is going to miss it when you come into an area. But with construction on campus, we’ve had occasions where we’ve had people sneaking into construction areas where they shouldn’t be, and on the bike, you can patrol those areas."

UC Police must go through an intensive initial certification process to be eligible for bike duty. Then, twice a year, department instructor Kevin Manz puts the officers through additional training.

UC’s team anticipates getting a chance to prove their skills against a national field on the same course in May. That’s when a national meeting of the International Police Mountain Bike Association will be hosted in the area, with teams from all over getting a chance to show their best on the competition course.