10 ms·

What happens to your bike after it’s stolen

75 points by bootload 12y ago

mullingitover 12y ago
I know the Constituion forbids it, but I think cruel and unusual punishment is A-OK when it comes to bike thieves.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Horse theft used to be a capital crime. Under the same constiution we have now.
  - undersuit 12y ago
    Horses are like bikes with personalities, I can understand some of the reasoning.
aaronharnly 12y ago
I'm reminded of this delicious line by a San Francisco bike guru: "Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another." (From this lengthy and fascinating first-hand account of a reporter's attempt to recover his stolen bicycle) http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-bicycle?page=0,1 http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-bicycle?pag...
- bootload 12y ago
  This is a great read. Nothing seems to have changed much since 2007.
easyname 12y ago
reminds me of this movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/
Barnabas 12y ago
If you have a nice bike, take a moment to register it: https://bikeindex.org/ https://bikeindex.org/
- bootload 12y ago
  and a few other tips ~ http://blog.mattgoyer.com/archives/2013/07/22/how-to-recover-your-stolen-bike/ http://blog.mattgoyer.com/archives/2013/07/22/how-to-recover...
- bike_index 12y ago
  Thanks for recommending the Bike Index! We recommend registering even if you have a cheap bike, since it's easy and free. Here's another article about what to do if your bike is stolen - https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-bike-has-been-stolen-in-the-bay-area-e08e6b6f005b https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-bike...
erispoe 12y ago
I wonder to what extend the intensity of bike theft will incentivize bike users to buy and use bikes of low value. I have conflicting anecdotal experiences about this. I lived in Rotterdam, where bike theft is intense, but where people usually ride cheap bikes every day, and where you know you can buy a cheap bike to someone in the street, for a price as low a ten euros. Bikes are a cheap commodity in Rotterdam. In San Francisco, also a bike theft intensive city, people seem to be undeterred in riding expensive bikes, and the expected price is in the hundreds of dollars. The difference might be that bikes sleep outside much more often in Rotterdam than in San Francisco. edit: typos
- jacalata 12y ago
  Are lower income people in SF riding expensive bikes, or just the well-paid ones? If bike-riding is a rich person's thing in SF, then the average rider will have spare cash to throw at it, stores can focus on selling more expensive bikes, higher prices are normalised...etc.
  - erispoe 12y ago
    Yes, I think you're right. In Rotterdam everyone ride bikes, regardless of their income. Whereas in SF, it seems more a young, relatively affluent thing.
  - aceperry 12y ago
    It's mostly younger people ride bikes, but because of the availability of bike lanes and public bike racks, more and more people from all incomes are riding bikes.
- paulhebert 12y ago
  Yeah, I've had multiple bikes stolen in the college town I live in. Now it's all cheap bikes until I move on or have a better storage system. Then again, I'm broke too, so I'm sure that affects my decision.
- bike_index 12y ago
  As someone who doesn't have a car and is broke, investing in my bike makes a lot of sense - public transit costs 100/month[1], my transportation bike cost 800$ and my yearly cost to maintain it is 100$ (tires, tube, chain). Therefore, in the first year, I save money. My bike is fast and convenient for getting around, which makes it a reasonable alternative to other transportation methods (it's faster than traveling by car within the city limits of Chicago). In contrast, a ~100$ bike is much slower and more expensive to maintain. Suggesting only fools ride nice bikes is short sighted. We need to make bike theft less profitable instead of telling everyone to ride shitty, impractical bikes. [1] in Chicago - http://www.transitchicago.com/travel_information/fares/unlimitedridecards.aspx http://www.transitchicago.com/travel_information/fares/unlim...
zht 12y ago
So what is the solution to bikes getting stolen? It seems like we cannot really make locks that are cheap enough to manufacture to prevent thieves from stealing bikes/harvesting them for parts. Do we put GPS trackers on all bikes? Can we enforce harsher punishment for bike thieves?
- schrodinger 12y ago
  I think bait bikes are a good solution. Put out a few normal looking bikes with gps trackers in them, and have stiff fines for those who get caught. Making locks safe against an angle grinder isnt really feasible, but making someone think twice before even trying because it's a bait bike might work.
  - Scoundreller 12y ago
    I used to wonder why people would often use a natural gas main as a locking point. Now I realize that it provides a decent defence against angle grinder attacks (or at least gets any thief some public safety or trumped-up terrorism charge).
    - lpsz 12y ago
      Interestingly enough, intentionally setting a trap (even on your own property that you expect to be burglarized) has been ruled to be unlawful unless your life is in danger. "The law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights in property." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Intent would be difficult to prove, versus "Its a convenient tied down point."
  - name_censored_ 12y ago
    Only three problems with that: Firstly, bait bikes are inevitably going to be cheap bikes. Thieves are more interested in expensive bikes - and if the expensive bikes are not only more profitable, but also safer to steal, then they're bound to step up their lock-picking and angle-grinding game. Secondly, finding someone to organise this would be difficult. Any single organisation sufficiently large enough to do this would be bureaucratic enough to insist on the same make/model of bike (for the obvious homogeneity benefits), which would make them as obvious as an undercover Crown Vic. Conversely, any kind of grassroots or community effort would (by design) need to alert as many people as possible to the venture, including the bike thieves themselves - thus spoiling it before it even begins. Finally, these things are chop-shopped almost the instant they get on-sold. Tearing a bike down can be done in a public park in 5 minutes flat with a pocket's worth of tools. The bike thieves can adapt a lot more easily than the sting operators.
mcfunley 12y ago
> Any bike thief worth his shim knows you’ve got to liquidate the rolling booty via parts When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article. It was also an open secret that local restaurants bought stolen bikes for delivery workers and just covered them up in duct tape. I'm sure this doesn't explain 100% of bike thefts. Maybe in Seattle chop shops are necessary, but in New York the problem seems so overwhelming that that just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary effort. The police generally could not care less.
- spydum 12y ago
  i mean i get it, law enforcement have to prioritize their time just like everybody else.. and a stolen huffy is not going to trump the domestic violence call, or the hit and run.. but it still sucks. come to think of it, stolen cars work effectively the same way. the only difference is they are tracked by so many other mechanisms (registration, plates, cameras, they are physically large enough to be difficult to hide). thieves suck.
- Symbiote 12y ago
  My bike was stolen in London in 2009, the day before I went on holiday. I found it on Gumtree (like Craigslist) the next day. I stuck the phone number in Google, and a load of other Gumtree adverts popped up -- "Call Dave" "Call Pete" "Call Andy". I sent this to the police. An officer phoned a few days later, and was really pleased and surprised at what I'd been able to do. She said she'd pass it on to the "intelligence team". Nothing seems to have changed since then: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182 (I picked one advert at random.)
  - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
    Heh, similar experience here. In fact I'm part of a facebook group for 2nd hand stuff, one dude always posts bikes for sale there, like 2-3 a week, but from like 50 different accounts. (hey it takes 1 minute and the bike sells for ~$100) Problem? He makes the pictures in his garden with a very particular fence I always recognize. I wasn't quite sure if he was just a repair guy with a small business, someone buying cheap broken bikes and fixing them up, using FB as a sales channel, or a proper thief. Until one day I saw someone comment on one of his bikes on facebook saying he went to buy a bike and that the guy had an elaborate camera and a television screen to see if the police rang the bell or just a regular buyer as well as some other negative comments. Police didn't seem to pick up the case though, he's still at it. But yeah I always put the phone number in google, if I get a load of different names I just move on. It doesn't happen that often, but when something is too good to be true it happens like 9/10 times.
peter_l_downs 12y ago
Priceonomics wrote another interesting article on the subject: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t...
jacquesm 12y ago
My uncle observed this in his thesis: 'the combined weight of lock and bicycle is a constant'.
chvid 12y ago
In Copenhagen, Denmark where bike riding and bike theft is very common, the police does little about it. In fact it came out recently that the police have an unofficial policy of not investigating thefts of value less than 13.000 euros due to "lack of resources". There is seldom story of say an angry man in a van running down two kids on a stolen scooter otherwise vigilante justice is very rare. I think for most bike thiefs are just having field day (year or decade) and probably quite a bit more organized than in Seattle due to massive market for bikes and bike parts here in Copenhagen.
- mrweasel 12y ago
  I don't think that stole danish bikes are sold in Denmark, not whole nor in parts. They are loaded on to truck and moved out of the country. I believe that most Danes buy their bikes part in stores (physical or online), making the market for stolen part very small. I understand that the police doesn't have resources to investigate every single bike theft, but perhaps if they looked at on a case by case basis and looked at the problem as a whole, then maybe the economy would be vastly different. If 100 bikes are stolen, they aren't being stolen by a 100 different people, more likely just a few people are responsible for the majority of those thefts. I worked at a company where the entire bike rack was stole at once, a truck backed up and the entire row of 30+ bikes was stolen. Because of how the system works the police will get 30 different cases of stole bike, each of which isn't worth looking into. It's a bit different from the US, because Denmark is much much small, but if the Danish police said "The next 3 to 5 years we invest heavily in finding bikes and preventing bike theft" then you wouldn't need to do much after that, because the criminal would have moved to a different country.
bootload 12y ago
"... Fortunately for Rosa, the Darlings were also allegedly fencing electronics, allowing the owner of a stolen iPad to track his missing tablet to the same apartment via an iPhone app connected to his iPad’s GPS. ..." Would be a nice hack to build something like this. How would you embed a device like this into into a frame & other parts? Comments: "... Ryan Scheel: Might it make sense to put a GPS device in bikes encrypted with a private key that only your computer has access to? ..." RFID inventory of parts unique to a bike? Would be interesting if each (high value) part had a unique serial number unique to the bike. Small RFID devices for the frame, wheels, seat brakes registered to a unique frame? That way each part could be tied to a frame & identifiable to one bike.
- jzwinck 12y ago
  If you are serious, the answer is to make the device a 1" tube that fits into the steer tube of most bicycles and can receive and transmit RF via the top cap (which would be plastic rather than the usual metal). Easy to conceal, near-universal fit (for bikes from the last 10+ years), sufficient space for a battery, radio, no visible parts. Charge using the tube as ground and the top cap bolt as hot. The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this).
  - chromakode 12y ago
    I thought this sounded familiar, so I did some searching... here's pretty much exactly that: http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp
    - jzwinck 12y ago
      Wow, thanks for digging that up. It even costs $152 right now (converted from GBP). Apart from the fact that you seemingly have to remove it to charge, looks good.
  - s_baby 12y ago
    >The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this). pre-paid sms is cheap.
peterwwillis 12y ago
I follow two principles to avoid bike theft: 1. always lock both wheels and the frame up with a very thick U lock, and 2. ride a bike less expensive to replace than repair. I regularly find bikes at Goodwill, flea markets, etc that are not stolen but are dirt cheap ($50, $100, etc). Even found a banged up old bike (dead tires, bad derailleur/gears) laying in a gutter. May not be the best ride in the world but it gets you from point A to B and never gets stolen. As for preventing theft in general, don't leave it locked up outside. That'd probably cut down on 90% of thefts. They could improve outside safety by building special wire mesh enclosures for bikes on bike racks, which would make it more difficult to steal, more obvious someone is stealing, and generally protect the bike from vandalism and the weather.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  And you know they're not stolen but amazingly cheap how?
- collyw 12y ago
  > don't leave it locked up outside. If I stopped locking my bike outside, I would likely never use it in the city.
ScottBurson 12y ago
Somewhere in the last year or so I read an article arguing that the reason bike theft is so attractive is that although the reward (to the thief) of the crime is small, the risk is practically zero. The suggestion was that if the police managed to successfully investigate and prosecute even a small fraction of bike thefts, they could increase the risk to the thief by several orders of magnitude. Since the reward is so small, this could effectively deter at least casual theft. There would probably still be professionals stealing expensive bikes, I suppose, but still, this seems worth trying.
- Paul_S 12y ago
  What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?
  - lmm 12y ago
    Then the deterrence might still be worth more than that?
  - RyanMcGreal 12y ago
    What if the benefit of chasing down a few bike thefts is that a huge number of potential thefts is deterred?
  - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
    $1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better security, but it often means more demand to steal it). At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders. What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate. Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory. If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.
dreamdu5t 12y ago
This article is incorrect. Kryptonite U-Locks cannot be picked with a bic pen. That hasn't been the case since 2005. That was only a certain model, and once made public they fixed it and offered free replacements.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  "Certain model" means literally every Kryptonite U-lock, except for the New York series, made prior to 2005.
WalterBright 12y ago
Back when I rode a bike to work, I parked it next to my desk.
Animats 12y ago
Tracking devices in about 1 in 100 bikes would put a dent in the problem. Hidden deep inside the frame, you'd find the chop shops.
bambax 12y ago
> You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily > The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market If the whole bike sells for $20, how can each component sell for "hundreds of dollars each"??? > her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared I didn't know bikes that expensive even existed. So maybe the parts that sell for "hundreds of dollars" come from $8k bikes, and bikes that sell for 20 bucks are the cheap ones; but the article isn't clear on this. It seems that owners of $8k bikes should refrain from buying parts on the black market, and that they can afford the small overhead (but added security) of only buying from legitimate dealerships? - - - Regarding the problem of bikes steal, is it better or worse to have a system of public bikes that can be rented for cheap? Paris (and London, and many other cities) have a system of public bikes that are available everywhere and that are very cheap to rent; I know those bikes get stolen (or broken) sometimes but they cannot really be resold as you can't legitimately "own" one. It would be interesting to compare the numbers of bike thefts for cities that have public bikes versus ones that don't.
- neotek 12y ago
  The difference is between a junkie quickly selling a bike to get a fix as fast as possible, and splitting the bike into components and knowing the right people to buy them. The junkie doesn't give a shit about tearing the bike down and getting the best price, he just wants to shoot up and will take whatever he can get.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jmspring 12y ago
An interesting local stat for Santa Cruz. According to the article, given Seattle has a population of about 650k, they are dealing with one bike stolen per 580 residents. During the last year, the reported bike thefts in Santa Cruz city was 404 and with a population of 65k, we are looking at one theft per 160 residents. Wherever there is a drug trade and a high transient/drug user population, there will be issues with bike theft. Where I live it is bad

75 points by bootload 12y ago

mullingitover 12y ago

I know the Constituion forbids it, but I think cruel and unusual punishment is A-OK when it comes to bike thieves.

ams6110 12y ago
Horse theft used to be a capital crime. Under the same constiution we have now.
- undersuit 12y ago
  Horses are like bikes with personalities, I can understand some of the reasoning.

aaronharnly 12y ago

I'm reminded of this delicious line by a San Francisco bike guru: "Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another." (From this lengthy and fascinating first-hand account of a reporter's attempt to recover his stolen bicycle) http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-bicycle?page=0,1 http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-bicycle?pag...

bootload 12y ago
This is a great read. Nothing seems to have changed much since 2007.

easyname 12y ago

reminds me of this movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/

Barnabas 12y ago

If you have a nice bike, take a moment to register it: https://bikeindex.org/ https://bikeindex.org/

bootload 12y ago
and a few other tips ~ http://blog.mattgoyer.com/archives/2013/07/22/how-to-recover-your-stolen-bike/ http://blog.mattgoyer.com/archives/2013/07/22/how-to-recover...
bike_index 12y ago
Thanks for recommending the Bike Index! We recommend registering even if you have a cheap bike, since it's easy and free. Here's another article about what to do if your bike is stolen - https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-bike-has-been-stolen-in-the-bay-area-e08e6b6f005b https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-bike...

erispoe 12y ago

I wonder to what extend the intensity of bike theft will incentivize bike users to buy and use bikes of low value. I have conflicting anecdotal experiences about this. I lived in Rotterdam, where bike theft is intense, but where people usually ride cheap bikes every day, and where you know you can buy a cheap bike to someone in the street, for a price as low a ten euros. Bikes are a cheap commodity in Rotterdam. In San Francisco, also a bike theft intensive city, people seem to be undeterred in riding expensive bikes, and the expected price is in the hundreds of dollars. The difference might be that bikes sleep outside much more often in Rotterdam than in San Francisco. edit: typos

jacalata 12y ago
Are lower income people in SF riding expensive bikes, or just the well-paid ones? If bike-riding is a rich person's thing in SF, then the average rider will have spare cash to throw at it, stores can focus on selling more expensive bikes, higher prices are normalised...etc.
- erispoe 12y ago
  Yes, I think you're right. In Rotterdam everyone ride bikes, regardless of their income. Whereas in SF, it seems more a young, relatively affluent thing.
- aceperry 12y ago
  It's mostly younger people ride bikes, but because of the availability of bike lanes and public bike racks, more and more people from all incomes are riding bikes.
paulhebert 12y ago
Yeah, I've had multiple bikes stolen in the college town I live in. Now it's all cheap bikes until I move on or have a better storage system. Then again, I'm broke too, so I'm sure that affects my decision.
bike_index 12y ago
As someone who doesn't have a car and is broke, investing in my bike makes a lot of sense - public transit costs 100/month[1], my transportation bike cost 800$ and my yearly cost to maintain it is 100$ (tires, tube, chain). Therefore, in the first year, I save money. My bike is fast and convenient for getting around, which makes it a reasonable alternative to other transportation methods (it's faster than traveling by car within the city limits of Chicago). In contrast, a ~100$ bike is much slower and more expensive to maintain. Suggesting only fools ride nice bikes is short sighted. We need to make bike theft less profitable instead of telling everyone to ride shitty, impractical bikes. [1] in Chicago - http://www.transitchicago.com/travel_information/fares/unlimitedridecards.aspx http://www.transitchicago.com/travel_information/fares/unlim...

zht 12y ago

So what is the solution to bikes getting stolen? It seems like we cannot really make locks that are cheap enough to manufacture to prevent thieves from stealing bikes/harvesting them for parts. Do we put GPS trackers on all bikes? Can we enforce harsher punishment for bike thieves?

schrodinger 12y ago
I think bait bikes are a good solution. Put out a few normal looking bikes with gps trackers in them, and have stiff fines for those who get caught. Making locks safe against an angle grinder isnt really feasible, but making someone think twice before even trying because it's a bait bike might work.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  I used to wonder why people would often use a natural gas main as a locking point. Now I realize that it provides a decent defence against angle grinder attacks (or at least gets any thief some public safety or trumped-up terrorism charge).
  - lpsz 12y ago
    Interestingly enough, intentionally setting a trap (even on your own property that you expect to be burglarized) has been ruled to be unlawful unless your life is in danger. "The law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights in property." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Intent would be difficult to prove, versus "Its a convenient tied down point."
- name_censored_ 12y ago
  Only three problems with that: Firstly, bait bikes are inevitably going to be cheap bikes. Thieves are more interested in expensive bikes - and if the expensive bikes are not only more profitable, but also safer to steal, then they're bound to step up their lock-picking and angle-grinding game. Secondly, finding someone to organise this would be difficult. Any single organisation sufficiently large enough to do this would be bureaucratic enough to insist on the same make/model of bike (for the obvious homogeneity benefits), which would make them as obvious as an undercover Crown Vic. Conversely, any kind of grassroots or community effort would (by design) need to alert as many people as possible to the venture, including the bike thieves themselves - thus spoiling it before it even begins. Finally, these things are chop-shopped almost the instant they get on-sold. Tearing a bike down can be done in a public park in 5 minutes flat with a pocket's worth of tools. The bike thieves can adapt a lot more easily than the sting operators.

mcfunley 12y ago

> Any bike thief worth his shim knows you’ve got to liquidate the rolling booty via parts When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article. It was also an open secret that local restaurants bought stolen bikes for delivery workers and just covered them up in duct tape. I'm sure this doesn't explain 100% of bike thefts. Maybe in Seattle chop shops are necessary, but in New York the problem seems so overwhelming that that just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary effort. The police generally could not care less.

spydum 12y ago
i mean i get it, law enforcement have to prioritize their time just like everybody else.. and a stolen huffy is not going to trump the domestic violence call, or the hit and run.. but it still sucks. come to think of it, stolen cars work effectively the same way. the only difference is they are tracked by so many other mechanisms (registration, plates, cameras, they are physically large enough to be difficult to hide). thieves suck.
Symbiote 12y ago
My bike was stolen in London in 2009, the day before I went on holiday. I found it on Gumtree (like Craigslist) the next day. I stuck the phone number in Google, and a load of other Gumtree adverts popped up -- "Call Dave" "Call Pete" "Call Andy". I sent this to the police. An officer phoned a few days later, and was really pleased and surprised at what I'd been able to do. She said she'd pass it on to the "intelligence team". Nothing seems to have changed since then: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182 (I picked one advert at random.)
- IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  Heh, similar experience here. In fact I'm part of a facebook group for 2nd hand stuff, one dude always posts bikes for sale there, like 2-3 a week, but from like 50 different accounts. (hey it takes 1 minute and the bike sells for ~$100) Problem? He makes the pictures in his garden with a very particular fence I always recognize. I wasn't quite sure if he was just a repair guy with a small business, someone buying cheap broken bikes and fixing them up, using FB as a sales channel, or a proper thief. Until one day I saw someone comment on one of his bikes on facebook saying he went to buy a bike and that the guy had an elaborate camera and a television screen to see if the police rang the bell or just a regular buyer as well as some other negative comments. Police didn't seem to pick up the case though, he's still at it. But yeah I always put the phone number in google, if I get a load of different names I just move on. It doesn't happen that often, but when something is too good to be true it happens like 9/10 times.

peter_l_downs 12y ago

Priceonomics wrote another interesting article on the subject: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t...

jacquesm 12y ago

My uncle observed this in his thesis: 'the combined weight of lock and bicycle is a constant'.

chvid 12y ago

In Copenhagen, Denmark where bike riding and bike theft is very common, the police does little about it. In fact it came out recently that the police have an unofficial policy of not investigating thefts of value less than 13.000 euros due to "lack of resources". There is seldom story of say an angry man in a van running down two kids on a stolen scooter otherwise vigilante justice is very rare. I think for most bike thiefs are just having field day (year or decade) and probably quite a bit more organized than in Seattle due to massive market for bikes and bike parts here in Copenhagen.

mrweasel 12y ago
I don't think that stole danish bikes are sold in Denmark, not whole nor in parts. They are loaded on to truck and moved out of the country. I believe that most Danes buy their bikes part in stores (physical or online), making the market for stolen part very small. I understand that the police doesn't have resources to investigate every single bike theft, but perhaps if they looked at on a case by case basis and looked at the problem as a whole, then maybe the economy would be vastly different. If 100 bikes are stolen, they aren't being stolen by a 100 different people, more likely just a few people are responsible for the majority of those thefts. I worked at a company where the entire bike rack was stole at once, a truck backed up and the entire row of 30+ bikes was stolen. Because of how the system works the police will get 30 different cases of stole bike, each of which isn't worth looking into. It's a bit different from the US, because Denmark is much much small, but if the Danish police said "The next 3 to 5 years we invest heavily in finding bikes and preventing bike theft" then you wouldn't need to do much after that, because the criminal would have moved to a different country.

bootload 12y ago

"... Fortunately for Rosa, the Darlings were also allegedly fencing electronics, allowing the owner of a stolen iPad to track his missing tablet to the same apartment via an iPhone app connected to his iPad’s GPS. ..." Would be a nice hack to build something like this. How would you embed a device like this into into a frame & other parts? Comments: "... Ryan Scheel: Might it make sense to put a GPS device in bikes encrypted with a private key that only your computer has access to? ..." RFID inventory of parts unique to a bike? Would be interesting if each (high value) part had a unique serial number unique to the bike. Small RFID devices for the frame, wheels, seat brakes registered to a unique frame? That way each part could be tied to a frame & identifiable to one bike.

jzwinck 12y ago
If you are serious, the answer is to make the device a 1" tube that fits into the steer tube of most bicycles and can receive and transmit RF via the top cap (which would be plastic rather than the usual metal). Easy to conceal, near-universal fit (for bikes from the last 10+ years), sufficient space for a battery, radio, no visible parts. Charge using the tube as ground and the top cap bolt as hot. The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this).
- chromakode 12y ago
  I thought this sounded familiar, so I did some searching... here's pretty much exactly that: http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp
  - jzwinck 12y ago
    Wow, thanks for digging that up. It even costs $152 right now (converted from GBP). Apart from the fact that you seemingly have to remove it to charge, looks good.
- s_baby 12y ago
  >The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this). pre-paid sms is cheap.

peterwwillis 12y ago

I follow two principles to avoid bike theft: 1. always lock both wheels and the frame up with a very thick U lock, and 2. ride a bike less expensive to replace than repair. I regularly find bikes at Goodwill, flea markets, etc that are not stolen but are dirt cheap ($50, $100, etc). Even found a banged up old bike (dead tires, bad derailleur/gears) laying in a gutter. May not be the best ride in the world but it gets you from point A to B and never gets stolen. As for preventing theft in general, don't leave it locked up outside. That'd probably cut down on 90% of thefts. They could improve outside safety by building special wire mesh enclosures for bikes on bike racks, which would make it more difficult to steal, more obvious someone is stealing, and generally protect the bike from vandalism and the weather.

mattmanser 12y ago
And you know they're not stolen but amazingly cheap how?
collyw 12y ago
> don't leave it locked up outside. If I stopped locking my bike outside, I would likely never use it in the city.

ScottBurson 12y ago

Somewhere in the last year or so I read an article arguing that the reason bike theft is so attractive is that although the reward (to the thief) of the crime is small, the risk is practically zero. The suggestion was that if the police managed to successfully investigate and prosecute even a small fraction of bike thefts, they could increase the risk to the thief by several orders of magnitude. Since the reward is so small, this could effectively deter at least casual theft. There would probably still be professionals stealing expensive bikes, I suppose, but still, this seems worth trying.

Paul_S 12y ago
What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?
- lmm 12y ago
  Then the deterrence might still be worth more than that?
- RyanMcGreal 12y ago
  What if the benefit of chasing down a few bike thefts is that a huge number of potential thefts is deterred?
- IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  $1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better security, but it often means more demand to steal it). At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders. What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate. Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory. If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.

dreamdu5t 12y ago

This article is incorrect. Kryptonite U-Locks cannot be picked with a bic pen. That hasn't been the case since 2005. That was only a certain model, and once made public they fixed it and offered free replacements.

thrownaway2424 12y ago
"Certain model" means literally every Kryptonite U-lock, except for the New York series, made prior to 2005.

WalterBright 12y ago

Back when I rode a bike to work, I parked it next to my desk.

Animats 12y ago

Tracking devices in about 1 in 100 bikes would put a dent in the problem. Hidden deep inside the frame, you'd find the chop shops.

bambax 12y ago

> You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily > The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market If the whole bike sells for $20, how can each component sell for "hundreds of dollars each"??? > her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared I didn't know bikes that expensive even existed. So maybe the parts that sell for "hundreds of dollars" come from $8k bikes, and bikes that sell for 20 bucks are the cheap ones; but the article isn't clear on this. It seems that owners of $8k bikes should refrain from buying parts on the black market, and that they can afford the small overhead (but added security) of only buying from legitimate dealerships? - - - Regarding the problem of bikes steal, is it better or worse to have a system of public bikes that can be rented for cheap? Paris (and London, and many other cities) have a system of public bikes that are available everywhere and that are very cheap to rent; I know those bikes get stolen (or broken) sometimes but they cannot really be resold as you can't legitimately "own" one. It would be interesting to compare the numbers of bike thefts for cities that have public bikes versus ones that don't.

neotek 12y ago
The difference is between a junkie quickly selling a bike to get a fix as fast as possible, and splitting the bike into components and knowing the right people to buy them. The junkie doesn't give a shit about tearing the bike down and getting the best price, he just wants to shoot up and will take whatever he can get.

deleted 12y ago

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jmspring 12y ago

An interesting local stat for Santa Cruz. According to the article, given Seattle has a population of about 650k, they are dealing with one bike stolen per 580 residents. During the last year, the reported bike thefts in Santa Cruz city was 404 and with a population of 65k, we are looking at one theft per 160 residents. Wherever there is a drug trade and a high transient/drug user population, there will be issues with bike theft. Where I live it is bad