7 ms·

I think the problem is not catching the bike thieves, more that the punishment given for stealing bikes is minimal, so it's not worth the police doing much abou

I think the problem is not catching the bike thieves, more that the punishment given for stealing bikes is minimal, so it's not worth the police doing much about it.

aidian 14y ago
In Cali, theft of anything under $400 in value is a misdemeanor...that means stealing your typical bike under about $1000 isn't a major crime.
ethermal 14y ago
But you could make possession of stolen property (the bike) a major crime with prison and financial punishment and you weaken the demand side of things. Then using RFID or similar technology, you could embed a RFID tag somewhere in the frame. Then allow someone to report a stolen bike with a police report, very similar to a stolen vehicle report and then using remote scanners you could scan for stolen bikes very easily. All it takes is fear of a stolen bike to scare away potential buyers.
- Cass 14y ago
  The US already proportionally has the most prisoners out of any country in the world, and I'm wary of any solution that includes making that problem worse. That kind of thing has giant socioeconomic costs and, looking at the crime rates, doesn't seem to work at making the country safer. I just don't think that finding yet another reason to put a whole bunch of people in prison (average cost per month between $2000 and $4000 at a quick google) over a bike worth $1000 is really going to make anything better in the long run.
  - dmm 14y ago
    The US also has a lot of crime. More people need to be in prison.
    - spacemanaki 14y ago
      Care to back that up? Does the US really have that much more crime that justifies locking up more people? Recent stuff I've read on this agrees with Cass (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...).
      - tylee78 14y ago
        compared to Germany the percentage of criminals seems the same - it's just that our criminals are on the streets, yours in prison.
      - pfedor 14y ago
        dmm's point was made by several people in the comments thread for the very article you cite, some of them quoting statistics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691372 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691372 tl;dr: In the U.S. in only 20% of murder cases the perpetrator is found and convicted of murder, compared with (allegedly) 90% in Japan. At the same time, even if all non-violent offenders (that includes all drug offenses) were released from prisons in the U.S. tomorrow, the U.S. would still have double the incarceration rate of Western Europe. I don't know enough to have an opinion either way, but intuitively this message has a true ring to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583
        vacri 14y ago
        Going from 7 times Europe's rate to double Europe's rate is still pretty significant. On your second link, the first half is reasonable, but the second half utterly misses the point. The reason why the police wait in 'The Wire' and in real life is because they're gathering evidence. If they don't have enough evidence, the case won't stick. Similarly, they're trying to catch the kingpins. If you catch the front-line dudes you can fill your prisons with them, but there will always be more (in places where it's bad, like where the Wire is set). It's weird that given the US already has such an immense problem with overincarceration that you think the solution is to lock people up over even more trivial issues. Where are those people going to be stored? Given the already clogged courts, aren't you going to have to abandon due process in order to get so many through?
  - roguecoder 14y ago
    Actually, it has made the country significantly safer: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/cv2.cfm http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/cv2.cfm Whether or not the decline in violent crime justifies the rise in imprisonment and the decline in prison standards, or whether there might be other ways to achieve the same declines are different questions. But the United States has become significantly safer over the last ten, twenty and fifty years.
    - learc83 14y ago
      That statement is incredibly misleading. Criminologists aren't anywhere close to a consensus on the causes of the crime rate reduction of the last few decades. Many theories have been offered, from decreased crack use, to fewer unwanted children resulting from legalized abortions, to your suggestion of harsher sentencing. Yes, Harsher sentencing may have something to do with it, but it could just as well have increased our crime rate and been counteracted by one of the other factors. There is no scientific consensus to support your claim.
      - Retric 14y ago
        Video games are actually one of the leading suspects for the drop in violent crimes.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I don't think you can measure the worth of a bicycle so simply. For many people, $1000 represents a very significant sum of money and their bicycle is their means of transportation. The theft of a bicycle can be a very life disrupting event. There is a reason horse theft used to be dealt with so severely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horse_thief_hanging.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horse_thief_hanging.png Now, obviously we should not start hanging bike thieves (as tempting as that may seem) but I definitely think this is not a crime to take lightly at all.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Can you make an RFID tag that you can embed in the bike such that it's easy to scan at a small distance, but also hard for the thieves to fry it or remove it? Because in order to be successful it would be to be standardized and if standardized the thieves would fry it if easy.
  - buro9 14y ago
    Yes. Already exists: https://www.immobilise.com/view.php?stage=product&category=1&product=2 https://www.immobilise.com/view.php?stage=product&catego... Goes down the seat tube and is a one-way insert only. Cannot be pulled back out, and is too large to push down and get out of the bottom bracket shell. I actually have those installed in all my bikes. Far simpler though: Every one of my bikes is littered with very small notes saying "If this bike was not brought into the shop by David Kitchen it is stolen, please call 07740949xxx". Those notes are in the stem, under the bar tape, under the rim tape, in the bottom bracket shell, in the seat tube, in the seat post. Everywhere you can hide a small note whilst building the bike that will be found when servicing the bike. I printed them on plastic using a Dymo machine, they weigh nothing... and if my bikes were stolen then one day they will arrive in a bike store for a service, and be returned to me.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      That sounds great. Now you need volunteers who run readers everywhere and upload them to a common website. People can see where their bike shows up.
  - lancewiggs 14y ago
    http://Taggle.com.au http://Taggle.com.au (I'm an investor) has a small device that allows remote tracking of assets like bicycles for years without an external power supply. The tiny devices broadcast a low powered wide spectrum ping every 20 mins to 1 hour and very smart receivers triangulate to provide coordinates. The transmitters can also send data, generally a meter reading or if a secure element is broken. Taggle Systems are focussing first on remote reading of water meters and other water utility use cases, but once networks are in place then tracking bikes will be doable.
- jseliger 14y ago
  But you could make possession of stolen property (the bike) a major crime with prison and financial punishment and you weaken the demand side of things. In legal terms, you'd have a problem with proportionality—that is, the idea that the punishment needs to fit the crime. This is partially a problem with fairness and partially a problem with incentives: if you give someone the same punishment for, say, stealing a bike and for beating someone up, then if you want to steal someone's bike you might as well beat them up to steal the bike. If you follow this logic, you eventually get to something like 18th C England, where a LOT of stuff was punishable by death, which led to large problems with murder: if you're going to be killed for stealing, you might as well kill someone, then steal, since you've just eliminated the witness.
  - checker 14y ago
    Your example doesn't apply because death is the ceiling. It's impossible to kill someone twice, so ultimately it makes no difference to the criminal. However, if the criminal gets 5 years for stealing a bike, and 10 years for beating someone up, the criminal might be swayed by 5 years vs 15 years. I can see the situation where the criminal thinks "I'm already probably going to jail, might as well decrease my chances as much as possible" by beating someone up. I think most bike crimes occur when the owner isn't around though.
    - pyoung 14y ago
      You are not taking into account concurrent sentencing. So if the punishment for stealing a bike was 5, and if assault was also 5, the guy would only serve 5. Theoretically at least.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    Or you end up with Singapore, which just has very strict punishments for minor crimes.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Making possession a crime at the level of first party theft doesn't have this problem.
zurn 14y ago
Increasing severity of penalties doesn't generally work for cutting recidivism (and you'd have to steal a lot of bikes to make the caused harm proportionate to jail time for a person, even if you subscribe to the lizard brain "revenge" school of thought on punishment).

I think the problem is not catching the bike thieves, more that the punishment given for stealing bikes is minimal, so it's not worth the police doing much about it.

aidian 14y ago

In Cali, theft of anything under $400 in value is a misdemeanor...that means stealing your typical bike under about $1000 isn't a major crime.

ethermal 14y ago

But you could make possession of stolen property (the bike) a major crime with prison and financial punishment and you weaken the demand side of things. Then using RFID or similar technology, you could embed a RFID tag somewhere in the frame. Then allow someone to report a stolen bike with a police report, very similar to a stolen vehicle report and then using remote scanners you could scan for stolen bikes very easily. All it takes is fear of a stolen bike to scare away potential buyers.

Cass 14y ago
The US already proportionally has the most prisoners out of any country in the world, and I'm wary of any solution that includes making that problem worse. That kind of thing has giant socioeconomic costs and, looking at the crime rates, doesn't seem to work at making the country safer. I just don't think that finding yet another reason to put a whole bunch of people in prison (average cost per month between $2000 and $4000 at a quick google) over a bike worth $1000 is really going to make anything better in the long run.
- dmm 14y ago
  The US also has a lot of crime. More people need to be in prison.
  - spacemanaki 14y ago
    Care to back that up? Does the US really have that much more crime that justifies locking up more people? Recent stuff I've read on this agrees with Cass (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...).
    - tylee78 14y ago
      compared to Germany the percentage of criminals seems the same - it's just that our criminals are on the streets, yours in prison.
    - pfedor 14y ago
      dmm's point was made by several people in the comments thread for the very article you cite, some of them quoting statistics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691372 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691372 tl;dr: In the U.S. in only 20% of murder cases the perpetrator is found and convicted of murder, compared with (allegedly) 90% in Japan. At the same time, even if all non-violent offenders (that includes all drug offenses) were released from prisons in the U.S. tomorrow, the U.S. would still have double the incarceration rate of Western Europe. I don't know enough to have an opinion either way, but intuitively this message has a true ring to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583
      - vacri 14y ago
        Going from 7 times Europe's rate to double Europe's rate is still pretty significant. On your second link, the first half is reasonable, but the second half utterly misses the point. The reason why the police wait in 'The Wire' and in real life is because they're gathering evidence. If they don't have enough evidence, the case won't stick. Similarly, they're trying to catch the kingpins. If you catch the front-line dudes you can fill your prisons with them, but there will always be more (in places where it's bad, like where the Wire is set). It's weird that given the US already has such an immense problem with overincarceration that you think the solution is to lock people up over even more trivial issues. Where are those people going to be stored? Given the already clogged courts, aren't you going to have to abandon due process in order to get so many through?
- roguecoder 14y ago
  Actually, it has made the country significantly safer: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/cv2.cfm http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/cv2.cfm Whether or not the decline in violent crime justifies the rise in imprisonment and the decline in prison standards, or whether there might be other ways to achieve the same declines are different questions. But the United States has become significantly safer over the last ten, twenty and fifty years.
  - learc83 14y ago
    That statement is incredibly misleading. Criminologists aren't anywhere close to a consensus on the causes of the crime rate reduction of the last few decades. Many theories have been offered, from decreased crack use, to fewer unwanted children resulting from legalized abortions, to your suggestion of harsher sentencing. Yes, Harsher sentencing may have something to do with it, but it could just as well have increased our crime rate and been counteracted by one of the other factors. There is no scientific consensus to support your claim.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Video games are actually one of the leading suspects for the drop in violent crimes.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I don't think you can measure the worth of a bicycle so simply. For many people, $1000 represents a very significant sum of money and their bicycle is their means of transportation. The theft of a bicycle can be a very life disrupting event. There is a reason horse theft used to be dealt with so severely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horse_thief_hanging.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horse_thief_hanging.png Now, obviously we should not start hanging bike thieves (as tempting as that may seem) but I definitely think this is not a crime to take lightly at all.
danielweber 14y ago
Can you make an RFID tag that you can embed in the bike such that it's easy to scan at a small distance, but also hard for the thieves to fry it or remove it? Because in order to be successful it would be to be standardized and if standardized the thieves would fry it if easy.
- buro9 14y ago
  Yes. Already exists: https://www.immobilise.com/view.php?stage=product&category=1&product=2 https://www.immobilise.com/view.php?stage=product&catego... Goes down the seat tube and is a one-way insert only. Cannot be pulled back out, and is too large to push down and get out of the bottom bracket shell. I actually have those installed in all my bikes. Far simpler though: Every one of my bikes is littered with very small notes saying "If this bike was not brought into the shop by David Kitchen it is stolen, please call 07740949xxx". Those notes are in the stem, under the bar tape, under the rim tape, in the bottom bracket shell, in the seat tube, in the seat post. Everywhere you can hide a small note whilst building the bike that will be found when servicing the bike. I printed them on plastic using a Dymo machine, they weigh nothing... and if my bikes were stolen then one day they will arrive in a bike store for a service, and be returned to me.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    That sounds great. Now you need volunteers who run readers everywhere and upload them to a common website. People can see where their bike shows up.
- lancewiggs 14y ago
  http://Taggle.com.au http://Taggle.com.au (I'm an investor) has a small device that allows remote tracking of assets like bicycles for years without an external power supply. The tiny devices broadcast a low powered wide spectrum ping every 20 mins to 1 hour and very smart receivers triangulate to provide coordinates. The transmitters can also send data, generally a meter reading or if a secure element is broken. Taggle Systems are focussing first on remote reading of water meters and other water utility use cases, but once networks are in place then tracking bikes will be doable.
jseliger 14y ago
But you could make possession of stolen property (the bike) a major crime with prison and financial punishment and you weaken the demand side of things. In legal terms, you'd have a problem with proportionality—that is, the idea that the punishment needs to fit the crime. This is partially a problem with fairness and partially a problem with incentives: if you give someone the same punishment for, say, stealing a bike and for beating someone up, then if you want to steal someone's bike you might as well beat them up to steal the bike. If you follow this logic, you eventually get to something like 18th C England, where a LOT of stuff was punishable by death, which led to large problems with murder: if you're going to be killed for stealing, you might as well kill someone, then steal, since you've just eliminated the witness.
- checker 14y ago
  Your example doesn't apply because death is the ceiling. It's impossible to kill someone twice, so ultimately it makes no difference to the criminal. However, if the criminal gets 5 years for stealing a bike, and 10 years for beating someone up, the criminal might be swayed by 5 years vs 15 years. I can see the situation where the criminal thinks "I'm already probably going to jail, might as well decrease my chances as much as possible" by beating someone up. I think most bike crimes occur when the owner isn't around though.
  - pyoung 14y ago
    You are not taking into account concurrent sentencing. So if the punishment for stealing a bike was 5, and if assault was also 5, the guy would only serve 5. Theoretically at least.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Or you end up with Singapore, which just has very strict punishments for minor crimes.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Making possession a crime at the level of first party theft doesn't have this problem.

zurn 14y ago

Increasing severity of penalties doesn't generally work for cutting recidivism (and you'd have to steal a lot of bikes to make the caused harm proportionate to jail time for a person, even if you subscribe to the lizard brain "revenge" school of thought on punishment).