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Large parts of America seem to still see bikes as "toys" rather than somewhat expensive vehicles that people depend on. Imagine if this approach was taken with recovered stolen cars too.

Except, it is almost the exact same with cars. If your car is stolen, there is very little chance the cops will actually help you recover it. If it is impounded, you too get to stand in line during business hours trying to get it back (if you can). At some point, those cars are also sold at auction.

Where are you seeing the difference?

Yeah - seriously. I only found my stolen car because someone reported it to the police because the people that were leaving it were being a loud nuisance.

Oh yeah - it was already being given parking tickets too. While it was reported stolen. I had to go to the local court in person in order to get the tickets revoked.

Law enforcement and the general institution of law does not care.

A friend of mine had his car stolen, his ex had a key and wanted to make him mad. We live in a rural area so the sheriff just dropped it off at his house once they recovered it. He even put gas in it and invited us to shoot at his range.

I've also seen cops change tires and things like that.

If you're in a more rural area - it will vary. I grew up with a LEO and in a rural area - so I'm familiar with how some cops will act in rural areas. There's a higher chance that if you're an officer in a rural area - you also live in that specific area that you're policing. Whereas in cities - it's very often that you're policing in a region where you don't vote or live in.

Even for people I knew in law enforcement in the rural areas - they didn't like to live in the area they were policing because of the consequences. You're now a local who has to live with the consequences of how you've treated people during your job.

This is why in the 1990's there was a big push by cities to require police officers to live in the cities where they work.

That was fine for a while, but eventually it got hard for cities to attract new cops, a lot of them removed those rules.

Mine showed up because it was parked in a side street with the windows down in the rainy season, and an officer on his morning bike ride took a quick peak and saw the keybarell broken.

I think there is only so much they can do from a systemic point of view, since they can't put the manpower into looking for them. When they are recovered it's usually because it's related to some other police activity that occurred and it was collateral to that. Same with bikes I think.

The issue is it can end up in an impound lot or tow yard and there seems to be no systematic VIN checking. The car could be auctioned without your knowledge.

I always figured it was supposed to not work like this, as the title change is the one place you can catch it, but I guess not? Must be reporting it as abandoned when it really isn't.

Hm yeah, it would be surprising if a VIN intact car went to auction but I suppose the US has a lot of states and systems to communicate between.

There are a lot more incentives to find a car than a bike. The money involved is higher, social risks too (less road kills due to a crazy bike driver). There's also less institutions at play, no rich bike insurance companies. Also most bikes are untraceable unlike car with plate numbers. And logistically it's harder to hide a car somehow (still possible of course).

I agree institutions are absurd and don't care enough though.

My stolen scooter (like a vespa) was only “recovered” after the police (or someone) found it totaled on the side of the road. The police then had it shipped to an impound lot. I had to pay the lot $400 for the courtesy of them storing it, and I told them I didn’t want my totaled scooter and they could send it to a salvage yard. My immediate impression was that the police officers were making money off this scenario.

> Law enforcement and the general institution of law does not care.

TLDR: Don't blame the street-level bureaucrats and everyone in the institution for policy failures.

You fail to understand that this is a public policy issue. I bet you the average individual cop does care. I use the term average so people don't resort to extremes (good cop or bad cop). His workload is so high that your issue falls below his threshold. It's not his fault, it's the fault of local public policy. It's undermanned and underfunded.

I remember my brother yelling at an Amazon driver for speeding. He's incentivized to do so by his employer. Yes, the driver probably shouldn't speed, but he's also not making very much money and needs this job. His employer is likely more guilty for not providing additional drivers, at cost, to allow safety. But that would be a market imperfection due to externalities which are not regulated (the externality being public safety - the cost of which the private institution generally does not bear). The same type of issue occurrs in the public policy arena, but the failure is on the lack of funding towards a known issue which results in poor services to the public. No, people cannot do more with less with zero losses.

> At some point, those cars are also sold at auction.

This is probably a big part of the problem really, why would they care about getting property back to the owners when they can profit from it?

> Except, it is almost the exact same with cars. If your car is stolen, there is very little chance the cops will actually help you recover it.

Nothing special about this. If anything of yours is stolen, the cops will not help you recover it.

Sure. I never meant for it to come across as exlusive. Returning stolen items is just never going to be much of a priority for the police. Unless maybe that stolen item was key to another investigation.

Honestly, I don't really think police should be in the business of tracking down stolen items unless finding the items leads them to the theives. So unless the theft of items is under some larger crime, why should cops be on the look out for a bicycle/car/tv/xbox/etc?

It's pretty much what insurance is for. Now, I'd much rather the police investigate the crimes committed by insurance companies on not paying out the claims. At least, that should be a crime.

We had a car stolen about 15 years ago. It was recovered a day or so later in the next jurisdiction over, and stowed in an impound lot. We drove over on a Saturday to retrieve it. We did have to pay something, but on the whole the retrieval was painless.

> Except, it is almost the exact same with cars. If your car is stolen, there is very little chance the cops will actually help you recover it.

Not the same thing. The parent comment is saying that the police department is getting ahold of the stolen bikes, but not making any effort to return them to their rightful owners.

If your stolen car is abandoned somewhere and found by the police, you'll be getting a call ASAP. They're obviously not out there scanning every car on the road to see if it's yours, but if it comes into their possession it's going to find its way back to the registered owner very quickly.

I’ve had a stolen car recovered, I was physically present and called the police. They insistent on towing it away and not letting me take it. Turns out the police have contracts with both the tow company and impound lot and it was not policy just a matter of revenue. I even had video of the police confirming the costs and wouldn’t you know the impound lot jacked up the fee 2x and insisted I pay in cash. It’s a racket and the longer the hold vehicles the more you have to pay, there are vehicles that are abandoned because the impound fee ends up exceed the value of the vehicle (that’s not a joke or exaggeration).

Theft of a vehicle (perhaps a constructed theft or the technical term for theft of a lost item) is almost always a felony, if not because of the item then because of the dollar value. Have you seen any case law in states about shooting tow operators and impound lot operators who steal cars?

If your car is stolen, there is very little chance the cops will actually help you recover it.

I was very surprised to read in a big city newspaper recently that the city's police department had a 70-something percent success rate in recovering stolen cars and returning them to their owners.

I was really shocked, because I just assumed that it would be like that scene in The Big Lebowski where the cop laughs when the guy who's car was stolen asks if they have any leads. It turns out that's not the reality at all.

Lots of stolen cars are used for joyriding or other crimes and then abandoned. The "recovered" statistic includes a lot of "your car was found six weeks later, trashed, in an industrial parking lot".

I don't think anyone is expecting the police department to return a stolen car washed, detailed, and with a new Christmas tree air freshener.

My car was stolen recently, and the day it happened I was told it's most probably already in a shipping container on the way to Haiti or something, and not to expect to get it back. The role of the police seems to be completely administrative rather than actually spending time trying to solve the crime. I expect insurance is the biggest difference between cars and bikes, and if one had theft insurance on the bike, the procedure and interaction with the police would be virtually identical for a bike vs a car

I had a bike stolen in high school and knew exactly who took it and the police still wouldn't do more than take a report, which they discouraged me from actually doing.

That's just because cops don't seem to do anything besides harass people. Solve actual crimes that harm people? Hell no they ain't got time for that

Many cities do little to nothing about bike theft. I've sat in meetings with a prior police chief of the city of Santa Cruz where he flat out stated, unless the owner sees the theft (or an officer does), they will not do anything. At the time, multiple other cities I spent time in (the east bay) would at least make contact with and check on people. If the person had bike theft tools on them, they'd be arrested.

Bike theft is one of the rampant issues in areas with excessive drug use, etc. Nearly every homeless encampment in west coast cities will have one or more people with piles of bikes and bike parts.

This is frustrating, because it's not a difficult crime to deter. The gain to the thief is very small, but if the city makes no enforcement effort at all, the risk to the thief is even smaller. Some people think that since police couldn't catch a large fraction of the offenders, it's not practical to deter the crime, but this isn't true; all that's needed is to bring the risk into the same range as the gain, which, again, is quite small. So almost any real chance of prosecution is sufficient. I've read that this theory has been verified experimentally, though I don't recall where.

Yet Facebook earns money of this illegal business, no? Just like their practice with the Amazon land plots they catered to buyers. The list of illegal things that Facebook facilitates in return of profits is endless and just banning the city is too short-sighted in my view.

Furthermore, there are many openly visible bike chop-shop shops among the numerous tent camps around Denver. I have seen some with 20-50 bicycles lying about; many more then camp inhabitants could personally use. Social media like Nextdoor notes these. Its a low priority to overworked police who are aware of them. The felony-theft thresholdin Colorado is $2000; which many better bikes exceed.

Don't bikes have serial numbers?

How hard is it to just publish the list of "found" and imponded bikes, that everyone can see?

They use the serial number as a means to identify that you are actually the owner. Denver has a system where if you register you bike with the city and your bike is found they'll notify you.

... and this serial-search system is closed to the public, whereas Bike index makes this possible to everybody.

The serial number sticker on my Specialized de-laminated and peeled off after a few years of commuting in occasionally damp conditions. I was kind of shocked that there wouldn't be a better way of uniquely identifying it if I needed to, aside from having pictures of scratches and dings.

In my country the registration is a sticker but and the bike frame itself also has a serial number engraved

Can't engrave carbon fiber.

you can inset a label into the resin, or a metal plate with an engraving on it. Or engrave any of the other embedded metal parts already in the frame for connection with the outside world.

Yes, this is a solvable problem. My hunch is that there’s no incentive for bike manufacturers to deal with this. If there were permanent serial numbers that could be attributed to the owner, they’d have to respond to thousands of requests for verification.

The registration is with the police. The bike manufacturer just has to stamp a serial number on the frame

i would not leave carbon fiber bike anywhere but in my locked house

For a more expensive bike it’s worth considering an active tracker. Some guys near hear burgled a bike shop recently, and were busted quickly one of the reasons being the owners noticed the stock moving.

It's worth doing a few things on the frame to make it unique. Bit of paint and so on. It both makes it identifiable and less attractive to professional thieves who want to flip whole bikes.

Yes, but usually the first thing thieves do when they steal a bike is grind away the serial numbers.

The extremely well-organized group detailed in TFA doesn't grind away the serial numbers, as you can see them in several of the photographs.

And make it clear from the start to any potential buyers that it is a stolen bike?

...yes?

The price of obviously stolen goods is usually significantly lower, sometimes a magnitude lower, than not stolen goods.

The buyers are well aware they are buying stolen goods.

I had a house break-in a number of years ago. That's a BIG deal, at least it was for me.

I understood then what it meant to feal 'violated'. I was also shocked that the cops seemed to be 'going through the motions'. They dusted for prints and took the identifying information I gave them, but I was expecting a little more action. I suppose I got that idea from tv.

Now that time has passed and I've had time to cool down, I think I better understand what I saw happening. The small-ish city I live in has a small police force, they're almost always busy with some minor crimes, probably domestic disputes, drunk drivers, traffic safety, etc. There's just not time fo r the pawn-shop snooping I was imagining.

I suppose if they had more budget, then there might be manpower for more activities. But I think the funding is about right-- I wouldn't want to pay for any more, and I wouldn't want any less safety.

That whole situation is profoundly depressing.

The theft here feels off the charts right now too.

I know a lot of police have quit and they don't have budget to increase next class size. Vaccines too..

Sympathizers say that cities' new rules on when to engage are a big cause but it seems to me we can have both enforcement and no needless violence. To me it feels like police are just having a temper tantrum saying you don't want us, watch what happens when we don't do anything.

I see cop cars breaking traffic laws around cap hill and downtown and just driving around staring at the homeless camps. Flipping on lights to go the wrong way down a one way street around civic building. When there is an OD (all the time) I just see them sitting in their car doing nothing but wait for paramedics. zero humanity.

I can't remember the last time I've seen a traffic enforcement stop and speeding & illegal parking is out of control.

I'm not sure if it's uniquely bad here? I know theft is increasing everywhere.

I've had my car broken into four times this year, often they just pull on the topper until it breaks open. Usually nothing in there. Once went through back window to the front. If a package is in the entrance more than a day it will be gone.

Last year I had a probably 300 pound, 4' x 6' wooden crate stolen from my back parking lot! insane. It was a pretty expensive marble sink top.

I've installed cameras and more lights doesn't matter or make any difference.

Somewhat off topic but insurance lady on the phone spent 20 minutes on hold trying to find a way to reject the claim... Same with my recent travel insurance. Provide them the bare minimum documentation and say nothing beyond a couple sentences on the phone they will just sit quietly on the phone waiting for you to say something, often emotionally since something crappy happened. they are looking for anything to use against your claim. Sucks.

People hate to see reality but let's be honest. Cops do a terrible job. If a crime against you happens. It will likely never be solved. The report will be there for you though

But they just don't have enough of funding is always the big complaint. And it's bullshit when they walk around with body armor and use military equipment from Iraq.

Crimes only get solved accidentally by cops. If they happen to see it go down and then somehow catch them in the act