Terry Ratzlaff 13y

Snowboarding is not a crime

Action Sports

When you look at a photo of someone snowboarding in an urban environment, you often notice things like the technical composition of the photo, or the difficulty of the trick, or the crazy setup that the trick was done on. But what you don't see are all the factors that go into making that shot work, before the snowboards get strapped in, or the cameras even get turned on.

There are so many things to consider: How are we going to get the speed to hit the jump/rail/wall/etc.? (This is where bungees and winches come in.) Is there enough snow? And most importantly, are the cops going to give us the boot as soon as we get set up?

This season has been a frustrating one. It seems like every crew I talk to faces the same problem almost everywhere we go: Police. How do we get around them? How do we get them to let us keep doing what we're doing? How do we find a middle ground? Can we find a middle ground? Why are snowboarders so prone to attracting the police anyway? Are we about to see the word "snowboarding" added to the "no skateboarding" signs posted every fun place there is to skate and ride?

The growing popularity of snowboarding in urban areas has increased the harassment level of urban police. But as it's still a novelty to see a snowboarder ollie onto a handrail downtown in some city that's hundreds of miles from anything that can even be called a "mountain," a lot of cops don't really understand what we're doing.

In my interactions with the police, I'd say about 50 percent are simply curious, and the other 50 percent think that we are breaking the law in some way -- they're just not sure how. I met some police this season who were awesome and were really interested in what we were doing. They didn't hassle us, or give us tickets, or give us the boot. Some of them even wanted to be a part of the story.

Then there were the other guys...

Now, I'm not saying that we are never breaking the law. Most of the time we probably are trespassing and we probably do look suspicious. But we're so harmless. We are not doing drugs. We are not vandalizing, and we are not committing serious crimes. You may disagree, but I really think they should give us a break. We're just being creative.

This is our story of two run ins we had with an awesome police officer in Denver, Colorado and a crew of police officers in Petoskey, Michigan.

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