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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Bike theft on the surface is also one of the easiest crimes to catch thieves.

Simply buy a fleet of bikes, fit trackers and motion alarms to each, somewhere hard to detect like inside the tyres, then park them around the city secured by shitty locks in areas covered by CCTV, and then as soon as any bike moves more than a few feet, go arrest the person moving it.

Considering in a city of 10 Million people, there are probably only 100 who actively walk around with bolt cutters, it should be a simple case of finding every thief.

Once you've found the thieves, the harder task is making them stop stealing bikes. Encourage courts to hand out "get drug free or go to prison" sentences. Offer new identities in new cities to people who have picked friends they regret...

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That would require initiative and the capability to execute. So much easier to just say "sorry, there's nothing we can do".

The last time I had a bike stolen, it was right under a CCTV camera from the company I was working at. The security people told me there was nothing they could do. The tools are in place, but there's absolutely no desire to use them. The same thing happens with people stealing packages off doorsteps. When I was still on Facebook, there were regular shares in the local groups of pictures of the thieves taking boxes from people's Ring doorbells or equivalent, followed by complaints about the police department having no interest in following up about the crime.

This approach has successfully been used against car thieves, but it’s controversial (rightly or not, some people consider it entrapment) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car

Something like Lojack but for bikes would be another way to go, if a city would commit to pursuing thefts of bikes with GPS trackers (with the additional incentive that it would likely lead to more recoveries).

Note that many Western European bike thieves no longer use bolt cutters but battery-powered angle grinders.

> Simply buy a fleet of bikes, fit trackers and motion alarms to each

Do that - and you'll be accused in "using the police to disproportionally punish the poor instead of working on the crimes that actually matter and helping the communities to get out of the vicious poverty cycle"

Sarcasm aside, this has some rationale: say you caught a bike thief. What you gonna do next? Fine him? He likely has no money. Put him into prison? Will cause more problems down the road.

Whipping his ass in Trafalgar Square would be a good option, but is highly unlikely to ever happen...

it's not about the petty little thieves, it's about the fences and big fish. you want the warehouses full of bikes and parts. the bikes aren't worth much to the thieves if they can't sell them easily.

> Once you've found the thieves, the harder task is making them stop stealing bikes.

Not hard at all if you make bike theft an automatic death sentence...

I know you're joking, but it actually is a hard problem. Desperate people do desperate things.

Anyone with the initiative to steal bikes or catalytic converters also has the initiative to do something productive.

But everything else with an equally low bar to entry is much crappier. Stealing bikes and cats you get to be your own boss. Doing manual labor you have to show up on time, not do drugs on the job. Working for the gig economy crap you have to please some of the worst of the general public and a black box algorithm. Sure you can try run scrap, do odd jobs or part out cars but if you do either of those enough to make "stealing stuff" levels of money the government will be up your ass the same way they would be if you were stealing cats and bikes.

These people aren't desperate. They're assessing their options for making a buck and it's no surprise that the "I don't car what other people think" subset chooses petty crime. They need better options for making a buck. Not stuff that alleviates the need to make a buck. Most people willing to incur the risks involved stealing stuff have enough initiative and work ethic they're not gonna sit at home and smoke pot all day if the government gives them a handout.

It turns out that improving the economic situation for people in an area leads to less crime. Weird how that works. Its almost like there is a whole class of crime that comes from real and perceived lack of opportunity.

You don't even need to buy the bikes. Just give the tracker to random citizens to put on their bikes.

Word will spread out really quickly that some bikes are bugged and there's no way to spot them (unlike the fleet of identical bikes purchased by the police department).

Much more important would be to find who they are selling these bikes to. The thieves would not be stealing the bikes if someone was not buying them up in huge numbers.

Often the pattern is they get stolen by random dudes, who then pawn it off to the local bike fence gang, who then ship it far far away and either sell the parts or the bikes somewhere else. If you dont recover your bike in a day, there is a good chance it's in a city far far away.

Look at this crazy story to see how international it can get: https://cyclingindustry.news/vanmoofs-pledge-to-recover-stol...

They sell them for £50 a piece back to the same bikers who had their bikes stolen.

I'm afraid I don't feel bad buying a bike from a dodgy guy in a street corner to replace my bike that was taken by a dodgy guy from a street corner...

That's what happens to cheap bikes, for sure.

I've seen it countless times in Italy, people don't even bother buying an expensive bike, they just buy some half broken bike (usually from the same dodgy guys in the streets who steal them) because they know they will get stolen. The police doesn't even bother fighting it, they often talk to many of the immigrants and rarely do something. I know because, as a second generation immigrant from Africa, the police was always stopping me just to talk.

It's kind of like bike sharing, you pay 20 euros until the next time they steal it from you.

On the plus side, it's giving a livelihood to poor and desperate immigrants who can't find a job in the sad Italian economy.

If it wasn't for bike theft and drug dealing, things would probably escalate to worse crimes.

Nobody here in Finland is buying bikes (or anything for that matter) from a dodgy guy on the street corner. They are usually sold online or if more organized operation forwards to some fence who ships them to another city (or country within the EU) to be sold. Depending on the bike they can also be sold as parts. Selling really expensive racing bike can be hard but selling the frame on its own after cleaning it is not that hard.

And if you are buying a 1000€ bike for 50€ you can be pretty sure it is stolen and buying stolen goods is illegal and can get you in trouble (if the police would actually be doing anything about bike theft...)

so where can i find those £50 carbon road bikes you are speaking of? no dodgy guy on my corner and classifieds are maybe 20% off the new price for an 8 year old bike "because i never rode it anyway".

i sometimes dream about eastern european villages where everyone rides superlight fullies and aero racers.

Wouldn't work in Sweden, so many privacy laws and concern would be broken with that offer.

Also don't forget that thieves are not stupid, trackers can be easily disabled and cameras avoided

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