A Seattle vigilante who beats the police to bike thieves | Hacker News Reader

A Seattle vigilante who beats the police to bike thieves

outsideonline.com

145 pointspkaeding126 comments

For those not in the Seattle area, it may be useful to understand that Seattle PD is in the middle of a months- or years- long work slowdown - a police strike, when you do away with euphemisms - in response to federal oversight of the department. They will barely respond to most crimes, so rising vigilantism is hardly surprising.

Ha ha, oh wow:

"We found that SPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the Constitution and federal law. Our investigation further raised serious concerns that some SPD policies and practices, particularly those related to pedestrian encounters, could result in discriminatory policing."

https://www.justice.gov/crt/investigation-documents

How old is that? There's supposed to be some new head honcho that will fix things.

There's always some new head honcho that'll fix things. The FOP won't have anything to do with fixing things. They're above the law.

While this characterization is somewhat accurate (they're still discriminatory in where they choose to show presence and enforce after all), even a typical run of the mill city cop shop isn't going to investigate bike thefts. You might as well ask them to find your Creedence tapes while you're at it.

Your point is well-taken, but notice that I wasn't claiming that not investigating bike thefts is evidence of the slowdown. I doubt these thefts would be taken too seriously anywhere, but I still think the work slowdown is some relevant context that people need in order to understand more about the situation.

Every college town has at least one theft ring that operates this way. If you see a beat up truck full of bikes on the highway, it's one of these guys moving bikes from where he stole them to where he is selling them.

Finding this activity is as easy as falling off a log. If you want to try this for yourself, you are literally minutes away from meeting a bike thief. He'll have 10-20 bikes on the cheapest locks on a campus bike rack, especially this time of year, or he'll set up a sketchy meeting as in this story.

WTF are cops doing if they are not busting patently obvious theft rings? Making this kind of bust should be utterly basic police work. It should be what the new guy does on his first day. Oh, right, they are raising revenue and fighting the long ago lost Drug War or looking for non-existent "terrorists." This is why policing has utterly disconnected from quality of life and middle class concerns.

I imagine it's public perception of the issues as well. If cops aren't stopping bike thieves nobody really cares, but if they fail to stop a statistically improbable terrorist attack in their area then it's far far worse for them. They'll get so much shit and flak for it, especially the higher ups. Jobs will change, so they priorities are shifted not toward what's useful but what the public deems consequential.

Why assume that? May people have been robbed and are angry. many more people have a rational fear of theft and are upset. The people care.

I think it's less general malaise and more that the police don't care that much about cyclists.

Police are there for crowd control first, public image second. Sometimes they can do good work, but that really isn't how they've been set up. At least, that's what the histories I've read say.

Hah. After I tracked down the seller of my stolen iPhone, I came across an eBay profile that was about as blatant as you can imagine.

Laptops, iPads and all such things, most "without chargers". Phones, most "activation locked".

100+ items.

Told the police. They declined to investigate.

Should have called back and said "Never mind, I shot him."

It would still be easier for them to charge you with lying to a police officer than investigating the stolen goods, and they'll still have a "win in their books."

you joke, but I have been told by police on two separate occasions (one car break in, one apartment break in) that I should have shot the assailant rather than calling the police first.

I live in a college town, with suspected organized bike theft. The theory is that bikes are trucked to say, Mexico, then sold - they aren't sold locally. That makes it very hard to track down your own bike.

I also remember the classic film The Bicycle Thief, where all the parts of all the stolen bikes are taken off, and liquidated that way.

you don't even have to go as far as mexico, they usually just move to the nearest metro.

That's correct. Steal them in Amherst, sell them in Ithaca. It may also be a "Traveler" practice. They are involved in all kinds of organized theft of middling value items, e.g. shoplifting infant formula, and home repair scams. Anything that can be sold on Craigslist.

I hear this is also true between Seattle <-> Portland.

I had my bike stolen while a poor student at University. It was my only mode of transport I had and it was the best bike I have ever owned. As the article mentions it's true that bike ownership can have a emotional aspect that other things don't.

I even remember seeing the guy who probably stole it. He was wearing a greatcoat even though the weather wasn't cold.

He would needed a greatcoat to hide the giant boltcutters he would have needed to cut through the very good chain I used to lock my bike up.

Still bitter.

I cycle about 40-60 miles around my major metro most days, and I also see a guy pretty often cycling in a big heavy coat, even in 100 degree (f) heat.

I wonder if he is a thief.

Maybe just a goth?

definitely not for any fashion purpose. its a big brown winter coat.

Well, is he on a different bike every time?

No, but why would he be? It makes the most sense to scout for bikes on one bike and when you find a score stash it as soon as possible, not ride around town leisurely on a stolen bike

Mine wasn't the best, nor good, borderline broken (left pedal unscrewed, thé reeason I had to leave it overnight in the city. I'm still bitter, as it represents many memories. I had dreams of motion tracker since.

As a Dutch person most of my bikes have ended up getting stolen. That's when it's time to get a new one.

This is such a frustrating issue. I understand that from a financial perspective it makes no sense to try and stop people stealing bikes or vandalising cities and I'm falling over myself trying to find a justification for doing so anyway but has any city ever tried?

On this scale, whether it makes financial sense shouldn't matter. Law enforcement is a public service, not a profit initiative.

No, economics still applies because we only have a finite amount of resources—funding, equipment, officers—and we need to distribute them intelligently to cover all the functions we expect from law enforcement. It wouldn't make sense for a small police department to spend $1 million on bike thefts which add up to $10,000 stolen a year (and nobody injured/killed): it would be a terrible use of tax dollars and would probably require neglecting other police duties.

Even though government service is not run for profit, it still has to deal with scarcity, so economic and financial considerations still apply.

Usually those problems have the same root. Denmark was mentioned. It is not like the allocated better, they do better in almost every regard.

I think a probabilistic argument makes sense. You don't have to pursue 100% of bike thefts to discourage them.

Bikes are just like any other stolen item. They typically end up with brokers who warehouse and distribute these goods in ways that are hard to scrutinize. The problem is that there will always be crackheads and there will always be sketchy people that willing to transact stolen goods. Its like a cosmic-scale version of wack-a-mole.

The best way to deal with bike theft is for owners to get wise about how they store and lock their bikes. Some amount of common sense about bike choice helps too. If you can afford a $3000 bike you can also afford a secondary $100 bike that doesn't make bike thieves salivate while you're grocery shopping.

If the brokers aren't being found, the police aren't doing their job. GPS trackers for bicycles are now down to $47.[1] When you find more than one stolen bike at one location, you've got something.

This worked for cars. Lojack, with their hidden transponder, caused a significant reduction in auto thefts. Lojack claims a 90% recovery rate. The main problem for bicycles is battery life. Someone needs to design a system which needs almost no power until the bicycle is stolen.

Lojack, which is a pre-GPS technology, does something like that. Their unit normally isn't transmitting. It's just listening to FM broadcast station subcarriers for its own serial number. When a car with Lojack is stolen, Lojack, which is plugged into police stolen car databases, has their FM stations broadcast the serial number repeatedly. The addressed Lojack unit wakes up and starts transmitting. Lojack makes a deal with police departments to put Lojack receivers in police cars. These light up when there's a transmitting stolen car in range.

You could do this today by connecting a digital pager to a GPS/GSM location transmitter. The GPS/GSM unit is normally off, and only turns on when the pager wakes it up. You can get six weeks of standby time on a digital pager easily. Add a power-from-motion device and you could probably keep the pager running indefinitely, as long as the bike gets some use.

OK, IoT crowd, get moving.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/...

Car-theft is alive and still doing quite well in spite of lojack and other technologies. Admittedly, cars today are harder to steal for a wide variety of reasons.

Knowing approximately where the bike is is only 1/3 of the battle. You still have to physically put your hands on it and remove it from whoever has it. I applaud the intent of a bike "lojack" but good luck getting the police to lift a finger when your bike tells you where it is.

That 50 bucks is better spent on a good U-lock upgrade.

Between 1993 and 2012, Property Crime has fallen from a rate of 4740 to 2859 per 100,000 inhabitants in the US. 2012's rate was 60% of 1993's rate. Burglary from 1100 to 670 (61%) Larceny from 3034 to 1959 (65%).

Compared to those dramatic declines (and yes, 1993 was a pretty bad year for crime in the US, but that's the FBI's stats), motor vehicle theft has fallen off a cliff.

In 1993 there were 606 per 100,000 inhabitants. in 2012 there were 230. The new number is 38% of the old number.

I hear about fairly advanced car thefts in the UK all the time (RFID cloning, etc), but it's a problem that virtually doesn't exist anymore in the US in the eyes of car enthusiasts. (Yes, 20 year old Honda Accord parked in the ghetto is still a target. But modern vehicles in relatively good areas are simply not something we worry about anymore).

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

In olden times, stealing a car was trivial. Ditto radios, which had resale value.

Now it's parts. Wheels, airbags, bumpers, etc.

It's also to provide untraceable vehicles for other crimes. My city has a huge carjacking problem right now, and most of them are used as get away vehicles in other crimes.

But we see a lot of smash the window and grab whatever bags are in the car in San Francisco.

Lojacks are trivial to remove. They are one of the first things experienced car thieves look for, remove and dispose of.

A GPS device on a bike will be the same thing. You can't embed it into the frame either, since you as the legitimate owner need to replace its battery every now and then, which means it needs to be easily removable.

Perhaps use rechargeable batteries and inductive charging

Briefly hook the frame up to a car battery and be on your way.

Put it inside the down tube. These usually have holes for mounting bottle holders, so you could pass the charging wires through the holes, disguised as part of the bottle holder mounts. And you'd have to remove the bottom bracket to get it out, which is slow and inconvenient.

>They are one of the first things experienced car thieves look for

If they are only effective against inexperienced car thieves, they still have value. It's like minor security measures that keep out script kiddies.

Heh, IoT.

Making bike thieves watch 30 seconds ads before they can disable the tracker would be vigilantism all right.

I think a better variation of that idea is embedding (or welding on) some sort of RFID chip in the frame that could be reported stolen or reprogrammed with a long code. Then you could search for stolen bikes in public places or put a automatic reader with a large siren on public bike paths and parking spots. Basically DRM for bikes.

It's might be challenging to make something that is cheap, long range (for RFID) and tamper proof of course.

>embedding (or welding on) some sort of RFID chip in the frame //

Why not just a low tech BIN (Bicycle version of a Vehicle ID Number (VIN)) stamped in the frame on the upright. You could also have a QR version printed. A traffic warden then could scan a rack of bikes and find any "reported stolen" ones.

Bikes with no QR would look suspicious and you could check the BIN (as would QR-BIN not matching bike style, colour, location). The BIN could be changed, but then so could an RFID chip (or a tracker); ground off frames would also look suspicious and warrant additional investigation.

You'd have to convince bike manufacturers to add BINs to bikes, which is likely against their financial interests as they probably sell more new bikes if bikes are more often stolen.

unfortunately in my experience it doesn't matter if you have a $3000 bike or $100 bike if the crack head stealing the bike is only going to get $20 for it

Well, if your $100 dollar bike is locked-up with a beefy u-lock next to other $100 bikes with flimsy cable locks...

There are two kinds of bike thieves, the kind that target any bike with weak security and sell it for $20 and the kind that are specifically targeting $3000 bikes in an organized fashion for whom no bike lock will be an effective deterrent if your bike is parked somewhere unattended for a long time or in the same place on a recognizable schedule.

Yeah, we had one of the latter kind get taken down here in Austin last year: http://keyetv.com/news/local/austin-police-arrest-man-connec...

Connected to 97 thefts of bikes valued from $1k to $12k, including taking only "the most expensive one" of the several owned by the fella interviewed in that story.

Although he really was exploiting a weakness, in that people figured their bikes would be safe in their closed-up garages. I wonder if a good lock would have been enough to make him move on to the next target on his list.

Maybe its just because I am a cyclist and have an emotional attachment to my bike (a 90s bianchi with campagnolo components that I paid $100 at a pawn shop for... which probably means it was stolen)

but I truly despise bicycle thieves.

Every time you give advice like this, imagine giving the same advice to car owners.

"Sure, you can afford a $60k SUV, but you really should also have a $2k shitbox that you drive whenever you can't park it in a locked garage"

Actually, quite a lot of car-owners think exactly that way (albeit not because of theft concerns but more about damage, wear/tear, accidents).

In any case, a 60K vehicle is going to be significantly harder to steal and it will be far easier to get the police to pay attention to that theft than a 3K bike.

Here in the salty Midwest, "winter beaters" are a popular thing. Not that they defeat the cold and snow, but that they sacrificially get beat on when it's nasty out.

Keep gas-guzzling, 4-wheel-drive, wins-in-a-crash truck thing with rusted out underbody for December to March, and a nicer car that never sees salt for the warmer months. Exchange insurance from one vehicle to the other as necessary.

Indeed, I have a winter bike for this reason. And another bike for taking to higher theft / vandalism areas such as downtown and the university campus. Plus, admittedly, it's fun to tinker with and ride different bikes. ;-)

realistically what bicycle enthusiast only has one bike??

There's actually an entire category of bicycle enthusiasts who only have one bike. ;-)

Also ask why you would ever walk into the garage and choose to ride the bicycle-shaped-object instead of the carbon fiber piece of artwork.

The solution to "nice things get stolen" is not "don't have nice things", it's "make it so people don't want to steal nice things".

When I want to ride a century on a nicely paved surface, of course I reach for the Cf frame.

If I'm just heading up to the store, my $100 pawn shop bike (which funnily enough was likely stolen since just the frame sells for 100+ on eBay) will do just fine.

For even sketchier times, like riding my bike to the local bar where they have no good place to lock up or I just don't feel like carrying a heavy duty lock, my Chinese made schwinn hybrid works nicely, handles variable road conditions perfectly, and I wouldn't shed a tear if someone stole it.

Usually if you are really into bikes you have at least 3, a "nice" expensive cf bike, a fixed gear you bought a steel frame on Craigslist and turned into a fixie, and a multi speed road bike that is for shorter rides or medium commutes but will be left in a shady area for a prolonged amount of time. you could either add or replace one of the former with a mountain bike. And that's just pretty much standard, not even getting into when people start collecting biked just because they like to have them around.

Also if you are like me or any of my cyclist friends, part of your living space looks like the back of a bike shop.

Cycling is an extremely satisfying hobby, and can be very cheap if you read up on what you should buy and spend a couple weeks with a discerning eye looking through local deals.

Also getting to know your local bike shop owner will do you more good than anything else. The guy down the street from me just opened his shop with himself and his wife. And they just do it for the love. He has never ever charged me for minor tuneups or servicing, even though his time is worth at least $50/hr and I would gladly pay.

He even traded a bike of similar value for free just because it fit me better than the one I had.

But because of his generosity I have directed multiple people to buy from him instead of a big box bike store.

These people are slowly getting driven out of business due to the internet, but they offer services that the internet simply can't (yet, I am sure there is some mobile bike mechanic app in SF but I live in a different metro.)

Especially for those starting out, some advice from a skilled mechanic will go a long way and save you a lot of money and pain in the long run setting you up with the bike you need (rather than upselling something you dont,) and more importantly, saving you pain in the long wrong setting you up with a bike that fits your body.

If anyone would like advice how to get into the hobby or as to which kind of bike to buy, feel free to ask me and I would be glad to point you in the right direction.

Well it may be annoying advise, but it works. My wife and I have a nice, newer BMW that we take out to nice events, dinner, long trips etc. Then we also have a very cheap 20 year old Volvo that we run errands in, get groceries in, go to crappy neighborhoods with, let people borrow it, and things like that. It really is nice to have a car you don't care about. Volvo gets hit in a parking lot? Tell the other driver not to worry about it, shrug it off, and go on with your day. No big deal. It's really sort of liberating. That said, I don't bike much, but if I did, I could definitely see myself with a nice bike and a "junk" bike for similar reasons. Definitely pretty reasonable advice

That's pretty reasonable advice. Whenever we're going to leave the car parked on the street in the city overnight (or at least late at night), we drive the old car, rather than the newer nicer car (though we're talking $25K versus $5K). Makes our car less attractive to thieves, and we care much less if it gets some minor damage. I'd be surprised if either of our cars were ever stolen since they have transponder keys and I don't think tow-truck thefts are that common in this city. We're more likely to run into smash-and-grab thefts. (only happened twice over almost 10 years, nothing of value was taken, and the window "only" cost about $200 to replace)

For that same reason, I ride the cheap $500 commuter bike to work or the store, and save the $4000 nice bike for long rides where I'm not going to leave it unattended. (well, that and the commuter bike has a rack so I can easily carry more stuff) I did ride the nice bike to work a few times, and parked it at my desk.

Unlike bikes, older cars are much easier to steal though. In the UK at least car theft is now mostly restricted to cases where the keys are stolen from the house, because modern immobilisers are so effective.

But it doesn't have to be this way. I was in Copenhagen a few weeks ago. I couldn't get over the number of bikes parked overnight that were locked only to themselves. Many bikes simply had their U-lock run through their front tire as a deterrent to anyone who might ride off on it. The bikes weren't actually locked to anything at all. Amazingly, these bikes were still there in the morning. In Portland, none of those bikes would have lasted an hour "locked" like that.

Ask yourself "why is that?"

People that don't see themselves in their fellow citizen.

What percentage of Denmark's population is transient/homeless? People with nothing to lose are more likely to steal something.

That's a bit of my point. In America, we allow far too many to get to a place where they have nothing left to lose. I'm not sure if Basic Income is the answer. Perhaps an actual mental health system. Whatever the solution, the status quo in the USA is shameful.

Yeah, I'm definitely for an actual mental health system. As well as a free, robust, and easily available addiction treatment system. And an energetic program to get down-and-out people off the street and back into productive lives.

People inevitably say, "what will it cost?" But that ignores how much we spend now. Wasted lives, mangled minds, broken families that pass trauma and dysfunction to the next generation.

Having personally lost bikes and chased thieves, I applaud join this vigilante's efforts. But that can't be the only thing to do. No 7-year-old wants to grow up to be a meth-addicted bike thief. As doing a Five Whys teaches us, if you're serious about solving a problem, you have to attack multiple levels of causality at once.

Homeless guys aren't running the rings in Chicago where they steal 400 bikes, load a U-Haul, and drive them to the west coast to sell.

Almost every bike I saw in Japan had "self-locks" - these were usually built-in and just locked around the rear wheel.

You're absolutely right that "it doesn't have to be that way". I don't know if its because everyone who wants a bike already has one (and thus re-selling isn't profitable) or if its because Denmark has fewer drug-addled fiends per capita, or if its because the cost of the grinding wheel to cut a u-lock exceeds the illicit resale value of a bike.

Whatever the case... a good ulock doesn't hurt even in Denmark.

Perhaps some culture war antipathy towards New Portland software engineering transplants (who I assume make up the bulk of such people in Portland, and I'm guessing you as well)? Though Portland isn't quite as expensive for cops to live in as SF.

You see this in say, Amsterdam too. But it's not that the bikes won't get stolen, it's that eventually they absolutely will, and then you'll just buy another bike again for almost nothing (which was also probably stolen - or salvaged from the canal after it was stolen and dumped...)

Not all bikes, but the beater bikes in Amsterdam are all just rotating through the population. It's kinda like a game.

I did hear there were quite a few bike thefts in Copenhagen. Neighbouring Norway has a national registry of bikes, which seems to be quite effective at lowering theft.

New York had a big anti-vandalism push as part of Giuliani's "broken window" based campaign to clean up the city.

Actually it does make financial sense. Here's why. Bike theft in many places now has an enormous reward/risk ratio not because the reward is large but because the risk is so minuscule -- small enough to be considered zero. People tend to think that the police would have to solve and prosecute a large fraction of bike thefts to deter the crime effectively, but that's probably not true. Any chance at all of being caught would cut the reward/risk ratio by two or three orders of magnitude, at least. Because the reward for the crime is relatively small, compared to other things a professional thief could be doing, that is likely to serve as a sufficient deterrent in many cases.

I've read that this has been tried somewhere and seems to work, though I don't recall the details. A municipality just needs to dedicate a small fraction of its resources to solving as many bike thefts as possible. Even if that's a small fraction of the total, it can be enough to turn the tide.

Same problem with people hopping turnstyles in the 80's. They increased the severity of the punishment and lo behold the crime went down.

Some people were having trouble with guys on the corner smoking pot in the 80s. So we started the war in drugs. Lo And behold crime went down.... Oh wait..

I know you're being facetious, but it's much more difficult to evaluate risk/rewards ratio for drug use, and the motivation for engaging in it is less linked to this ratio than for other crimes.

Though I say that, and think back to Prohibition... which didn't involve the same addictive properties to which I'd attribute these properties of the War on Drugs, so I doubt myself.

I don't have answers either. You need punishment to prevent some crimes I think. But at some point it stops helping and it just hurts. Or perhaps we need another way to influence behavior. State mandated morality? Meh

I am asking this 100% seriously. I have never actually seen police helping anyone -- only seen them harrassing or extorting money (outright or via bogus traffic citations). I have come to the conclusion that the idea of a police force that is really there to help citizens may be a myth.

Someone posted a link in this thread about the Austin pd breaking up a bicycle theft ring.

The problem is, as with all theft, unless someone witnesses the crime as it is occurring by the time the cop gets to the scene it is too late to find the bike. Experienced thieves will scope out bikes ahead of time and have a place to stash them quickly, and even if the police do arrive quickly, are they supposed to interrogate every person on a bike to check if it is stolen?

Basically they need to focus on these theft rings that steal bikes en masse and move them to another region to sell.

I have on more than 3 or 4 times seen a truck with the bed FULL of bikes I'm talking stacked 6 feet high with a cage around the bed.

Where did all those bikes come from? And ive never seen a decent bike in the stack. Mostly children's bikes (easiest to steal as I imagine children don't secure their bikes very well) and Wal Mart beaters.

The usual way to find organised thieves is with a decoy bike in a high theft area, with surveillance and police lying in wait.

> are they supposed to interrogate every person on a bike to check if it is stolen?

This is what Japanese cops do. Every bike is registered to a name, and they radio to check the registered name and frame number against your id. It takes about five minutes. My bike has been stolen three times (probably by different people) and they recovered it twice and caught the thief the third time.

Wow, sounds like being a cyclist in Japan is hell. I've had a bike stolen, and it sucks, but not nearly as much as it would suck to be stopped by police all the time and expected to prove ownership of my bike.

It's a hassle, but the check is over in 5 minutes. Show your photo id (which Japanese usually carry, and foreigners are required to) and if the names match you're good to go. If the bike isn't reported stolen and your ID is good they'll send you on your way. If it's reported stolen you'll have to go to the police station to do some paperwork even if it is your bike.

Pretty interesting & fun story. The article itself was did go a bit over the top beleaguring the heroic super-hero nature of the person, but if you can read around the purple prose & redundant praise there were some cool pieces of info:

- The bike index is an interesting concept, working around the balkanized nature of PD databases.

- The actual narrative was quite funny & interesting.

- How pervasive an issue this is escaped me as a non-biker. I didn't realize how expensive bikes are and how often they get ripped off.

My friend recently had his bike stolen. It was recovered after it was thrown over a fence of a local business.

The thief most likely didnt know how to ride a fixed gear with no brakes, crashed, and ditched the bike.

A bike with no brakes is dangerous. Almost good riddence.

Fixed gear bikes have the brakes built in. Just stop peddling.

1) The vast majority of braking power comes from braking the front wheel. Applying backwards pressure to the pedals does nothing, which means a fixie's braking power is considerably limited.

2) Additionally, the braking is much smoother and more easily regulated with real brakes.

3) Stiction is stronger than dynamic friction. If you brake the rear wheel just below the point at which the wheel skids on the ground, you're disapating more power than if you skid the rear wheel i.e. you'll stop faster not skidding than skidding.

These reasons are why in many places (e.g. the UK) a front brake is legally mandatory.

Edit: spelling

or put your feet on the ground

I recommend diving face first into the first available wall. That is by far the fastest way to reduce the speed.

If a wall is not situated conveniently enough, old ladies are surprisingly sturdy, and will stop even a high speed fixed-gear hipster at the reasonable cost (to the cyclist) of a broken hip or a few legs or arms.

I was walking across an in-park maintenance road with some friends. It was just another part of the park, full of people, dogs, kids, bikes. A rider was bearing down on the spot that I was about to walk through, screaming "get out of the way, I can't break!" She was angry. In a crowd of pedestrians.

I really didn't know whether to be amused, astonished or outraged that she would ride that fast in a crowd with no breaks!.

You have never ridden a fixxie I guess? The back wheel can be locked to the pedal. Meaning if you stop pedaling you fly over the bars. Fastest stop ever.

Having ridden a fixie for some time, this is incorrect.

It's a lot of work to just "stop pedaling" - precisely as much work as it would take to accelerate from a stop to your current speed. If you're unaccustomed to it, the force can easily lift you off your seat.

If you do somehow manage to lock your pedals, you will not fly over the handlebars. Your rear wheel will skid, probably out of line, and you will slow ineffectively. You might end up under the bars, but not over.

It's much more effective to stop using the front brake, which is installed on any decent fixie for the reasons listed above. Not only does it require much less effort, it is more controllable and faster because your front wheel is more heavily loaded than your rear wheel.

It seems to me that the connecting of bikes on Bike Index with bikes for sale on various online marketplaces could be, at least partially, automated. It seems like a fun challenge, especially the pictures-only marketplaces...

Like I posted somewhere else in this thread, people fencing stolen goods usually list a bike that is different from, but similar to the bike (or any other item) they are selling. When contacted, they'll say they already sold that bike, but can gladly sell this other bike they have that is similar, and usually for a lower price that almost guarantees a purchase.

I'm disappointed this article wasn't about Seattle's true superhero, Phoenix Jones.

https://youtu.be/t2pNxzmZDbs

Phoenix is by all accounts not helping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Jones#Arrest_record

You mean he has more than a single arrest with no charges?

"Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes has called Jones a "deeply misguided individual."

Here is an idea. Given a Craigslist listings and Tensor Flow deep learning whatever, build a tool for searching stolen bikes -- batman style.

All you need to do is look for bikes that are being sold for far less than their fair value

This doesn't happen. Dealers aren't stupid. They sell stolen bikes for market price.

It can happen if you are willing to buy directly from the meth-head under a bridge at an odd hour of the day. $20 can get you a nice carbon fiber racing bike under the right conditions and if you personally have no morals.

Knowingly buying stolen goods is also a crime. And if you're buying a CF racer for a 20, you sure know it's stolen.

Did you read the article? The guy gives very specific details about stolen bikes being sold for well below market value.

The people selling stolen bikes often don't put much information, so you'd get lots of false positives.

You might get a lot of false positives. I'd go so far as to say it is likely.

However, the point is the algorithm may just surface a pattern that you hadn't considered.

People selling stolen goods on craigslist almost always use a bait and switch scheme. They will list one item, and when they get a response, they'll say, "oh I sold that bike, but I also have this very similar one for sale..."

but I guess you could programatically account for that if you were truly so inclined.

Instant CL TOS violation and would get you C&D'd. There have been stolen-goods-finding sites shut down by CL for less than that ...

I always wonder where this never ending market for stolen bikes is. I live in SF I'm on my 3rd bike in two years, this time I learned my lesson and bought a beater.

I'm also not sure what I want done about it. On one hand, feeling that your personal property is unsafe makes it very hard to build a healthy community so it's worth policing small thefts. On the other hand, I know the cops around here have way bigger issues to tackle.

Interesting. I always wondered what motivated this personality type. Seems that they get a high from it. (Not that I am bothered by it, I am glad they do).

  But do you know 5miles? Or Letgo?  Or OfferUp or Neerbuy
  or Saily or VarageSale? These sites are a visual
  marketplace, showing pictures of an item but often 
  including few words to describe it. They offer the seller
  anonymity while making it hard for police or others to
  search the web for keywords. Lost a bike? You could spend
  hours scrolling through pictures across more than a
  half-dozen sites trying to track it down. Then do it
  again the next day. These sites may sell legit
  merchandise. But they’re also the 21st-century way to
  fence stolen goods.

This makes it sound an awful lot like these sites are knowingly - or at least with a Lucille Bluth wink - catering to people fencing stolen goods.

I seriously doubt their business model is based on fencing stolen goods but I would be interested to hear the customer service directors excuse for why this is not the case.

I don't work for one of those apps, but have used one. I like it because it is a lower-friction way to buy and sell items. I can take pictures of items in my garage with my phone and quickly list them without going to my desktop and writing up a Craigslist post. It's the same old story of Uber/Tinder/etc making something easy to do on your phone.

I've had three bikes stolen, but none in the traditional way of coming back to a bike rack only to find the bike missing.

Two were stolen from my garage by workers, these were by people with jobs and not by homeless crack heads. One was a $2500 road bike and the other was my mountain bike.

The other a multi-speed street bike was lost to a mugging (like a bike-jacking) by an organized bike theft gang of around eight that attacked me all at once. (Stay clear of suspicious groups of cyclists in isolated areas where one spry rider is riding double.)

The workers didn't get my nice tri-bike because it was in the house attached to a wind-trainer.

It's all very irritating; the value of the bikes to the bike thief is so low compared to the cost of replacing them.

Here is an old Reddit AMAA of a bike thief that sheds some light on the business and the reason the thieves are motivated to steal the bikes

Looks like you're missing a link. Could you provide it please?

sorry about that

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cir79/iama_former_bik...

Had my bike stolen when I was in college. Still miss it, at the time the cops didn't give two shits.

Anyone have experience with insurance companies like Velosurance[0] or claims against renters (or homeowners with a reasonable deductible) insurance for bike theft?

[0] https://velosurance.com/

Priceonomics did a story on the stolen bike problem : https://priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-st...

Minor, but: the URL has a bunch of params like a user ID from a mailing list. Is it standard practice to remove these on HN? I wasn't sure but thought I'd mention it.

MUMEN RIDER!

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