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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 un

by 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.

by chvid 12y ago

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.