Originally Posted by
howsteepisit
Sudo, I think that it would have been understandable under these circumstances to fight back. But to me, breaking out a window in the vehicle is not fighting back, its escalating the situation, and ultimately whether it was escalation or not, an innocent cyclist was severely injured. Yes, I personally believe that the cyclists could have ducked down a side street, or stopped and not passed by the guy, or some such thing, but for sure, if they decided enough was enough, the first hit should have been aimed to disable the driver, not to damage his car.
But you don't have any information at all behind the window breaking. All we know is a window was broken by one of the cyclists. There's no other context. There's no way to know if this was broken in the course of a scuffle, if it was just out of pure frustration, if it was meant as a deterrent... there's just no way to know how it went down. And in the heat of the moment, weird things happen (personal experience... worked at a hotel with more than our fair share of altercations).
Big assumptions against the cyclist need to be made in order to assume it was just escalation. I agree that disabling the driver, if that point was reached, would have been a better course of action, but particularly for people who have never experienced it, violence is a very hard thing for some people to engage in, even when necessary. People get panicky. Who's to say whether the window was busted out from anger, fear, or any number of other visceral reactions you might expect when you're being harassed by a lunatic in a 2 ton steel cage. It's easy for us to criticize from our comfy chairs without tons of adrenaline pumping through us.