STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - Two people got arrested and had their bikes confiscated after riding recklessly in New Dorp on Tuesday afternoon.

About time.

The arrests were announced by the 122nd Precinct just hours after the Advance published photos of a group of 20 teens riding their bikes across three lanes of traffic on Hylan Boulevard in Dongan Hills.

You're not allowed to do that, kids.

Not the first time that such images have been out there. Kids post their own videos of themselves doing this dangerous stunt-riding all the time on YouTube and social media.

The shocking thing is that it took police this long to collar someone.

And there seems to be some outrage over the arrests out there, outrage that the police actually enforced the law on reckless biking. You'd think they'd set up bicycle checkpoints all over Staten Island and were pulling kids over.

But here's the thing: They cyclists put themselves at risk with this kind of behavior. They put motorists at risk. They put pedestrians at risk. That's worth a little deterrence once in a while

So let's relax. It's not like police are treating reckless biking like some kind of international crime wave just because they did a little enforcement. It's become an upside-down world when the enforcing of laws is more suspect than the actual illegal or unsafe behavior. Not the world I want to live in. I like a society of laws.

Just a bunch of kids joyriding, you say? Well, it's not the 1970s anymore. There aren't a lot of places left on Staten Island where cyclists can safely take over three lanes of traffic while doing stunts on their bikes. It's no longer the kind of borough where you can play kickball in the street and not see a car for half an hour. Those days are gone.

If you've never encountered a group of a dozen or so kids on bikes just blowing through a red light at an intersection that you're driving through, then you really don't know how dangerous this behavior can be.

It happened to me twice in once evening a year or two ago. I was just about to go through a green light at Clove Road and Mosel Avenue intersection when I caught something out of the corner of my eye and I stopped. It was a group of about a dozen kids on bikes, including some popping wheelies, coming from my right side.

They had the light against them, but they didn't slow down a bit. They just blew through the intersection. If I hadn't stopped, there was a very good chance I would have collided with one or more of them.

And you know who would have gotten the blame for that. A few minutes later, I saw the same gang of kids on Targee Street, still riding recklessly.

Maybe the police have better things to do. But some of these incidents are so brazen and out there in the open, it hardly takes a deep investigation in order to put a stop to it. I don't think we're taking any resources away from our battle against heroin or street crime.

And besides, if something's against the law, it's against the law, isn't it? The police are here to enforce the law.

There's also basic fairness: Drivers are expected to follow the rules of the road. Why shouldn't cyclists? Drivers get targeted by Vision Zero edicts. Why shouldn't cyclists? And pedestrians, for that matter. Safe roads are the goal, and we're all part of that equation.

We're not calling for mass arrests of cyclists. Mass confiscation of bikes. Just a little deterrence. Once in a while. Some might say it's anti-cyclist. Stop clutching your pearls. It's pro-safety.