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Comment by liminal | Hacker News Reader

The key is to catch the people who buy stolen bikes in bulk. The thieves need somewhere to fence the bikes, without that they'd be stuck trying to unload them on the street. Years ago in Toronto they arrested a single person who had warehouses of stolen bikes [1]. After that bike theft dropped dramatically.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kenk

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Anecdotally, bike thefts in Toronto are as high as ever. It's most likely a mix of an increase in the number of cyclists + bikes in the city as well as more brazen and organized thieves.

I've had two thefts in twice as many years recently. A handful of friends have also had their bikes stolen in the last two years. It's very demoralizing.

Stolen bikes are often take to Poland and other Eastern European countries. With the current border control in Denmark we could solve a large part of the problem by stopping outbound trafic, rather than incoming.

Kaliningrad oblastj, the exclave of Russia between Poland and Lithuania, has the best selection of used bikes for sale in Russia.

This is the key to solving property crime. Arrest the fences, the pawn shops, the chop shops, the guy with a warehouse full of bikes.

When you can't turn property into quick cash, the incentive to steal goes down. A lot.

How in the world did he only serve 16 months in jail for stealing that many bikes?

Would you prefer they count each bike as a separate crime so that once somebody has stolen a certain quantity they'll be locked up for life?

16 months combined with some sort of monitoring afterwards (and, in an ideal world, support in jail and afterwards to find it easy to move into legal work) should be enough to make the crime not worth doing and to hopefully stop that person doing it again.

Would doubling that prison time help anything?

Agreed. The real goal is "don't do this again" not "sit in a room forever"

He can't do it again if he's executed.

> Would you prefer they count each bike as a separate crime so that once somebody has stolen a certain quantity they'll be locked up for life?

No, but something like a log scale would've been good.

He certainly didn't steal 3000 bikes at one time. If a person steals 3000 TVs each from a different store, should he only serve time for one?

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