To the surprise of nobody:When Sarah Harling was hospitalized by a minivan driver who made a left turn into her at a stop sign intersection, she says the SFPD officer who filed the police report included a fabricated statement from her claiming that she "approached the stop sign without stopping."
Harling said she tried to submit a response to the numerous "factual errors" in the police report, but an officer at SFPD's Richmond Station "raised his voice to lecture me about how traffic laws apply to cyclists too, how he'd never let his children ride bikes in the city, and then told me repeatedly, 'I'm not telling you you can't leave this here, but you just need to understand that sometimes things get lost.'"
"I left the station in tears," she said.
Harling later hired an attorney, who collected witness statements and a photo, which showed the driver to be at fault and led the driver's insurance company to settle for his or her maximum amount of coverage available.
"To say that the San Francisco Police Department failed to investigate my crash is not quite accurate. Rather, they refused to. Repeatedly," said Harling. "I got the message, again and again, that because I had been riding my bicycle, it was my fault."
"Every one of the top 40 records being played on every radio station in the United States is a communication to the children to take a trip, to cop out, to groove."
