Photo: Anthony Rebholz/This is FYF

Via Gothamist, local blog This is FYF posts this scene from Houston Street earlier today. Apparently, with President Obama due in town for a speech at Cooper Union, NYPD jumped at the chance to drastically overreact by confiscating New Yorkers’ personal property. We haven’t been able to confirm with the public information office yet, but This is FYF says police cited "security concerns that bikes might be secret pipe bombs" as their excuse:

NYPD officers clipped the locks of hundreds of bikes along Houston
Street this morning in preparation for President Obama’s speech at
Cooper Union. The bikes were unceremoniously put in the back of the
truck.  There was no prior notification of the bikes needing to be
cleared along the route by NYPD and onlookers were not given
information as to what would become of the bikes.

NYPD’s penchant for equating bikes and cycling with security threats is, historically speaking, a recent development. If they were doing this stuff forty years ago, Governor Rockefeller might never have made it to his Earth Day speech in Prospect Park.