Entertainment

Alec Baldwin Calls Out the NYC Police

by Kadeen Griffiths

In case you haven't heard, Alec Baldwin was arrested in New York on Tuesday. Apparently it's actually illegal to ride your bike against traffic and to ride your bike without a license. Baldwin was stopped by the police for riding against the flow of traffic and was put in handcuffs when he didn't have a license for them to check. Who knew? All right, so Baldwin also unleashed some of his infamous Baldwin rage on the police officers, which contributed to the charges against him, but, seriously, who knew you needed to have your license with you to go bike riding?

According to Baldwin, that's not exactly what happened. Baldwin tweeted his anger at the situation not long after his release and, honestly, he's just making a bad situation worse. Sure, Twitter is basically everyone's go-to website for passive aggressive conflict resolution, but is anyone who was doubting the claims of Baldwin's disorderly conduct really going to point to his equally disorderly tweets and say, "See? I told you that Baldwin was an all right guy!"

Baldwin claimed that the officer who arrested him was fabricating his behavior and that New York City is a "mismanaged carnival of stupidity", but what was the point? Trust me, Baldwin, we were all on your side with this one. Biking without a license? I don't think any of us even knew that was a crime until now. People would probably have outright objected to Baldwin getting arrested for that if it wasn't for the little matter of him getting uppity with the police.

Then again, that's probably exactly why Baldwin felt the need to speak up. In his version of events, he calmly agreed to go with the arresting officers and any reports of disorderly conduct were fabricated by Office Montero in order to "protect herself". He says that he asked them to ticket him, did not expect any special treatment, and that it was Officer Montero's decision to "do this the right way" and cuff him. He goes on to say that anything else they said about the incident was a lie.

What Officer Montero was protecting herself from is still unclear, but one thing that is clear is that Baldwin really didn't need to fan the flames here. If his charge was disorderly conduct, then he's not going to help his case by railing against the police officers and New York City on the Internet. He even went so far as to tweet Officer Montero's badge number for reasons that hopefully have nothing to do with rallying his fans to get her suspended.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call New York City a carnival of stupidity, it's true that this was a pretty tame charge to get taken down to a station for. Baldwin summed it up best with one tweet that would have been a more powerful statement if it was the only one he wrote: