VanMoof’s team of ‘bike hunters’ appears to succeed where the city doesn’t
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
Shifter has a great video bike crime - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4
But a few things come to mind: (especially for e-bikes)
1. Bike registration. Most e-bikes / high-end bikes cost as much as a beat up car. having them all come with basic registration makes it very hard to sell a stolen bike.
2. Bike tracking. Ebikes should come with airtag-like functionality standard. It is a $10 maximum overhead.
3. Bike alarms. If you have a tracker, it should have an alarm. The bike already has a bell. just put a put servo in there.
4. Last but most importantly - prosecution. Treat ebike theft like car theft. That's $1-10k value of stolen property. No reason to allow it willy-nilly.
2. Tracking and surveillance in e-bikes is the last thing I want.
3. So you get an alarm that the frame of your hike showed up in a remote warehouse, 80 miles from city. Police won't bother and you'll be wise to not go there by yourself.
4. More funding to police, in other words? Theft won't investigate itself.
Yes, and more funding for prosecutors and correctional officers. But it doesn't take much enforcement and prosecution to establish deterrence.
If it's your bike? Sorry for your loss dude!
Two months in prison, preferrably with penal labor. Repeat offences leading to longer sentences, including several years expulsion from major population centers. Let's see how their bike stealing goes over in a small town.
While I think escalating punishments for repeat offenders is appropriate, the key to stopping anti-social behavior is not severe sentences. It's consistency in catching/punishing these acts:
addition mine.
Effective enforcement is consistent enforcement, even a 'minor' fine or weekend in jail is a sufficiently large stick but no stick is big enough if you don't actually hit anyone with it. What's the current clearance rate for bike theft? 1 per 10,000, if that? You could have a whole bike thieving career and never see the inside of a squad car let alone jail cell.
That video of casey neistat's where he steals a bike in front of a crowd, the three officers there had been NYC officers for 10 years and had never seen a bike thief amongst them.
Just give the bike back, pay any damages, if it's gone, then pay the value of the bike, some jail time, community service, any/all of the above. This is not a hard problem: people are behaving like children, taking what is not theirs and breaking social agreements/boundaries. So treat them like children and do the adult equivalent of "get a spanking and say sorry, so you know not to do it again.".
Admittedly I have no data for my area to back these thoughts up, but punishments are only important if people are actually getting caught, and they are only a deterrent to those who care. People still steal cars all the time and that is grand theft.
Official reported thefts from the Netherlands [1](Note that the number of bike thefts is probably far higher than the official number):
Car thefts: 8,670 Bike thefts: 60,010
[1] https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/83651NED/table?sear...
As for chasing cars? Depends on department policies. Out in my region they chase in almost every situation except for cars driving wrong way in divided traffic. Has lead to stuff like cops plowing cruisers into the trees trying to chase a motorcycle rider through windey roads.
This is how it works in Hawaii, and they are very strict about it. All bikes get a frame sticker with VIN number, and it's illegal to posess one without it. Kind of annoying but it helps immensly.
Nope. All bicycles have to be registered with the state.
Anyways, in Amsterdam mosr VanMoof's I see are still attached to something with a chain lock. I think tracking your bike is too much of a hassle. Also it is probably needed for insurance reasons.
Tracking a vehicle is great. My wife’s scooter has a tracker and my motorbike doesn’t. I was scooter-jacked a few years ago by a couple of scallys and the police found the scooter 90 minutes later in a car park where they’d dumped it - to check if it was being tracked.
My motorbike was then stolen from outside my house. Super annoying but then it turned up - randomly and spookily - literally outside my old house where the thieves had dumped it in case there was a tracker on it.
So trackers work - whether they’re installed on not.
I am not sure to what extent this is what prevents bike theft in Japan vs the general law abiding nature of people in Japanese society as it relates to not stealing anything
Presumably, if you buy a second hand bike, it was almost certainly stolen. How to get no one to buy a second hand bike though?
Maybe I am just lucky, but at least once a year one of my peers had theirs stolen. The things I did different:
- get the best lock you can get
- your goal is not to make your bike impossible to steal, just to make it mor attractive to go for the bike next to it
- bike should look like shit while being in excellent technical shape (e.g. my frame is a old slightly rusty KTM racing bike frame, but with Shimano Ultegra)
- never put the bike into an dark corner, where it is the only bike to steal and thieves can do so unobserved, instead try to put in the spot where a thieve might expect someone to observe them. Nobody ever took a bike dirctly in front of a store exit if it looks like you might return any second now.
- don't leave your bike anywhere outside for more than a night if you can't avoid it
Paint your bike very uniquely. Eg. Bright pink. Thieves can't be bothered to repaint it, and being so unique makes it hard to sell.
Write your phone number on every part - wheels, frame, seat, etc. Nobody buys a second hand bike covered in phone numbers without ringing the number.
My anecdata is that I've only had one bike stolen and it was the cheapest, worst one I've ever owned (parents bought on 2for1 offer). It was protected with a good lock which was cut through and surrounded by dozens of nicer ones in a secluded bike garage, some of which had incredibly basic and weak combination locks. These days I just insure my bike and use two big locks (leaving them in situ at places like work).
I've also seen a drunk courier (after work) fall off their bike and while they were getting up someone picked up their bike, hopped on and cycled off very slowly in front of dozens of people. 2 police on foot were also there and stalled, pretended to listen to lots of accounts, to kill time and avoid a chase or indeed any action at all. But that's another story.
> It was protected with a good lock which was cut through and surrounded by dozens of nicer ones in a secluded bike garage, some of which had incredibly basic and weak combination locks.
This is an odd one. Maybe the bike had specific parts the thieves were after? Shitty bikes are often targeted by drunkards who just try to get home (they steal it for transportation, not for money). But they would get stopped by a good lock (provided it is actually locked).
It's not impossible to steal one of course but it adds up to a lot of trouble and risk for not a lot of payoff. Most bike thieves would prioritize easier, less risky, and more valuable targets.
I use Swapfiets, which is a Dutch bike leasing startup. I just pay a monthly fee and don't worry about theft, repairs, etc. There are many thousands of them across Berlin; hundreds of thousands across many European cities. Nobody ever messes with these bikes. They are so recognizable that there's no point in stealing one. No bike hunters required for this. It has no tracker or alarm. I've had one for two years in Berlin and nobody ever messes with it. And it's a decent bike too. I park it wherever I want including some places where I would never park any bike I own like the train station, rough neighborhoods, etc. It's great. I can go anywhere I like in the city, leave the bike on the street for a few hours and it will still be there when I come back. I do this every day. They have electrical ones too. They are very popular with delivery services.
What does this mean? why don't they get stolen?
[0] https://www.quora.com/Where-do-I-buy-new-U-Haul-trailers/ans...
Best way to get away with some crime is to act all casual about it. Wear a warning west, you can even got one printed with some official town logo the people will recognize.
Some of them occasionally will try anyway and that's where the bike hunters come in. We're not talking Sherlock Holmes here. This is simply about chasing down idiots that steal bikes and the scum that buys the bikes knowing full well what they are buying. Easiest job ever, these are not criminal master minds.
When or if you do find the bike on a facebook marketplace listing, the Cops and VanMoof do nothing. As they can't attempt to purchase the bike, and can only be engaged if they see the stolen bike's serial number in the public space.
The benefit was the insurance, where they simply replace the bike with a deductible of ~$100
Just have an accomplice keep the stolen bike in an enclosed area where there is no GPS access. Disable the AGPS for bonus points (apparently that is possible)
Basically it uses an internet connection to find the satellites positions and not having to calculate them their selfs.
The first time it got stolen in Berkeley, I recovered it. It hadn't gone far, so the police were able to locate it and the thief.
The second time it got stolen, I couldn't recover it. But I had already bought the Peace of Mind coverage plan, so VanMoof replaced it — and lent me a bike of the same model in the 2 weeks it took to deliver.
Interestingly, both incidents happened in busy areas in the SF Bay Area. I guess that the bystander effect was strong.
Or is there also an element of a widening gap between rich and poor here, where the rich will be further insulated from the impact of failing public services?
as if city leaders have ever considered cyclists anything more than an annoyance
It's not just a matter of funding; there's only so much lab capacity.
Rape is a tiny fraction of violent crime - barely a few percent - and spending millions processing rape kits unnecessarily is virtue signaling that does nothing to reduce the bulk of violent crime. The only reason it's getting so much attention is because it benefits a politically privileged class.
Lab capacity is a matter of funding.
(i.e. you could have more lab employees if housing was cheaper.)
However, there is a stolen bike store near where I live, everyone knows they sell bikes they’ve stolen, they’ve been busted selling stolen bikes multiple times, and they’re still in business today.
Perhaps this has always been true, but it feels as if we’ve completely given up against low level crime.
It has always been thus throughout history.
This is why the vast majority of police need to be disarmed.
You're not in the club if you have enough free time to spend commenting on HN.
Musk has enough time to spend on Twitter. Don't see how "being rich" precludes commenting on teh interwebz.
They are always on two kicks: self-improvement or making more money. If they have "free time" they are travelling and reading books, not spending time with not-rich people, except perhaps as a safari to understand them better.
Police forces were literally created to protect capital, and then back ported to supporting local communities. The parent poster is correct, police exist primarily to protect the interests of capital - that's literally their history.
Saying "thing A was originally B therefore A is secretly B now" doesn't seem to usually be true.
All the anecdotal evidence I have (US, non-SF) suggests being connected or related to the local police is a blue collar signifier.
I'm not arguing that it isn't some sort of privilege, but suggesting that you also have to have "a couple millions" first sounds peculiar to me.
There’s a USENIX paper floating around as well. Known for several years now. Wild OP is getting downvoted, this is known research for a few years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081900
There's lots of firsthand evidence online about the free cameras themselves. It's not like they were particularly secret about the initiative.
I'm not minimizing the issue of consent, I just wonder if outraged people (especially HN types) are aware of how things are normally, and either way, are/would be outraged about voluntary cooperation.
Is it generally considered ok to put up cameras and voluntarily help the police out of a desire to protect the community?
Just because someone is angry about one thing doesn't tell you if they have a problem with something related, but slightly different. Which is why I was asking.
snow crash was written in 1991 as I recall
I don't think it's something you can lay at the feet of the SF Police Department. I asked Pete McLaughlin, SFPD (retired), why the police don't go after bike thieves more aggressively.
"Our hands are tied," he said. "They [the thieves] know the most we can do is give them a citation, and they'll be out that afternoon."
California has a history of being lenient with non-violent crime, which is appropriate in some cases, but maybe not in others. Maybe leniency is the wrong approach for some of these bike thieves.
But it's complicated. I heard Jerry Brown (former California Governor) talk about how ~10% of the state budget goes to prisons, and he's not comfortable with such a large amount, and I agree--throwing people in jail is expensive!
Lastly, when the SFPD was needed, they move fast: I had a home invasion a couple of years ago (a guy kicking in my window, trying to break in), and five police were in my apartment within minutes of the 911 call. Worth 20 stolen bikes IMHO.
That being said there is a lot to be done at that leading edge, especially when its not uncommon to see someone with a dozen bikes in varying states of disrepare piled amongst the detritus outside their dwelling. It seems like that should be considered probable cause to me and worthy of more investigation vs just letting that continue unhindered. There is some line between the cops I was familiar with in the midwest (who would search your vehicle and throw everything on the side of the road on the grounds of smelling of pot if they just didn't like the look of you), and the ones here in california who are more concerned with catching snorelaxes (1) than enforcing the law.
1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5q593/lapd-officers-ignore-...
Edit: because this is HN I was initially thinking VanMoof also had a service one could attach to any bike. Seems it’s proprietary offering for their bikes. Original text left unedited above
Personnal and friends experience tends to agree with the article advice. The intensity of the ask vary from "It's my bike" to "It's my bike and we don't want to call the cops about it, right?". Most of the time, they may try to sell it back to you though.
I’m afraid to ask, but which country was this?
It’s not “progressiveness” that attracts homeless encampments, it’s density.
Where there are people, there are resources. It’s got nothing to do with politics.
If you look at each state’s share of the total number of people in the US experiencing homelessness, is unsurprising that the states with most are also home to the latest cities. Texas is low per capita, at a state level, but when you look at rates within cities then Texas and Florida and Arizona cities start to pop up.
It’s not like conservative local governments have “solved” homelessness.
As long as there is homelessness, dense urban areas will always have the largest share of people experiencing homelessness because there are simply more resources, in the general sense, there. Where there are people, there are resources.
Let’s not forget climate as well. California, and the West coast, have a pretty favorable climate in general.
Anti-stalking? Seems they overlooked a huge flaw during product design that nulled a whole potentially billion $ product.
The things are pretty obvious and are intentionally so. They have an audible alarm that goes off if they sense movement and send a notification to your phone if they can connect to 4G (Iffy). I guess some Canadian city tried to run a bait bike program using them but no one would touch the bikes with an alarm. Personally I prefer to deter than to have to hunt down the thieves and retrieve.
By far the best way to prevent theft is to register your bicycle and encourage others to do so as well. I use Project 529: https://project529.com/garage
Police tend to not enforce bicycle theft, mostly because proving ownership is not usually possible due to lack of VIN numbers and registration. Having proof of ownership like photos, Project 529 stickers, and such is a great way to help police stop bike theft.
From experience tracking down a different GPS module and stolen bike: If you tell the kids who answer the door your bike was lost and there’s a reward for whoever found it, things go more smoothly than getting the cops involved.
"AirTag is designed to discourage unwanted tracking. If someone else’s AirTag finds its way into your stuff, your iPhone will notice it’s traveling with you and send you an alert. After a while, if you still haven’t found it, the AirTag will start playing a sound to let you know it’s there.
Of course, if you happen to be with a friend who has an AirTag, or on a train with a whole bunch of people with AirTag, don’t worry. These alerts are triggered only when an AirTag is separated from its owner."
(https://www.apple.com/airtag/)
So in an effort to prevent stalkers from tagging victims, the AirTag beeps to give away the fact that it's tracking something "separated from its owner." This makes it useless for my use case because if my bike is stolen, it will be "separated from its owner."
sfpd doesn’t do anything about anything. Check out that great video of the cops rolling up on a burglary in progress. Perp comes out the door, gets in car and drives off. Cops do nothing.
When vigilantism is the only justice available you’re living in a failed state.
Cops and the city council WILL retaliate against you though for embarrassing them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/t2u3fq/guy_in...
A workplace of someone I know is constantly getting burglarized. They even found the guy selling their stolen stuff on Facebook. Kent PD, of course, won't lift a finger about it.
Yet, somehow, they manage to soak up half the city's budget, and also secure a million-and-a-half dollar settlement for a police sergeant who was fired over having a nazi poster in his office.
KPD doesn't even need to pretend that defund movements are to blame for their incompetence - because as far as I can tell, the mayor's full-time job is covering their ass.
[1] For people who don't live here, Kent isn't some liberal hippy paradise.
(As a counter anecdote, I’m further out in the East Bay, and when I caught a guy taking my bike from my garage, the cops stayed on the phone with me as I chased him down and actually arrested the guy when they caught up with us. I was surprised.)
What you're observing isn't a 'failed state'. The apparatus of the state is working quite fine, and the state is completely capable of enforcing its will on its subjects. [1]
What you're observing is the police doing their job[2] (Which is protecting the state), and not the job you want them to do (protecting you and yours.)
[1] The definition of a failed state is one that is incapable of enforcing its will on its subjects. Which is what you see in, say, 2021 Afghanistan, where the central government is only theoretically in charge, with Taliban rebels actually being able to enforce their will on the country. There's a categorical difference between 'can't' and 'can't be arsed to' - and you're observing the latter.
[2] Why doing that job entitles them to half of your municipal taxes is an exercise for the reader.
If individuals get any benefit from this it's either accidental or police trying to protect their image.
In reality, police departments went on effective strike, enforcing only the policies they wanted to, and leaving many cases open so as to provide statistics for bad faith actors to smear the reputation of the DA who has no actual control over the police.
This disturbed local populations, but those people were quick to blame "criminals" because there seems to be an infinite fount of good faith assumptions reserved for police, even in the face of so much evidence of how bad they are at their jobs (willingly or otherwise).
It's a well documented fact that Boudin refused to prosecute pretty much anything besides police officers. Why would police officers arrest anybody in that case?
It's the same story with other Soros-funded prosecutors: Gascon in LA, Kim Foxx in Chicago. To give them credit, they don't hide that their own goal is to protect criminals. People should listen.
A note about the recall campaign: the funding for both sides would have been roughly equal except for one PAC -- NEIGHBORS FOR A BETTER SAN FRANCISCO ADVOCACY.[1] That PAC ultimately took in 84 donations for a total of roughly $5.8MM, meaning average donation size was roughly $70k. If each donation was given by one person (reasonable estimate) and each person lives in SF (provably false) then that represents around 0.01% of the population of SF. Not exactly the groundswell of support it was portrayed to be.
An article in The Nation[2] goes into detail about the context around Boudin's time in office and the hysteria of commercial real estate interests who, rather than working to mitigate the problem that generates such fears, stokes the fears instead.
[1] https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.asp...
[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/chesa-boudin-reca...
sounds like vancouver police
sounds like seattle police
unless you're literally engaged in a gunfight with lead flying around their response is terrible.
We had 4 bikes stolen from our shed in Vancouver and the police were helpful. We called the non emergency number and an officer followed up quickly via email, sent a case number for insurance claims and one of the bikes was returned a few days later on a Sunday evening from a chop shop bust.
They even have a dedicated bike theft officer - https://www.macleans.ca/society/meet-canadas-only-full-time-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1oBcbRSK48&list=PLWwEynoexJ...
I leave my bike locked up outside overnight in San Francisco [0], and with three sturdy locks I'm not worried about thieves, but the vandals are another story. Ten days ago I came outside to discover they had set my bike seat on fire, which also ruined the rear tire and tube, along with some cosmetic damage. Total cost to repair: $283. My bike is vandalized typically every 90 days or so.
[0] https://briancunnie.medium.com/how-to-lock-your-bike-overnig...
Rope bike prank (2018)
Anyway, there is a difference in an insured bike recovery system that has the right incentives and SFPD which does not have the benefit of GPS tracking and profit incentive. Of course their success rate will be dire in comparison.
it's certainly very lucky that the thief always went directly towards the guy hiding behind a tree with a pie. Helpful also that they stayed in the sightline of the camera, even though several of them did have to look directly at it to be sure.
> The Standard accompanied VanMoof employees Adrien Yeung and Bret Carmody on a “hunt” in early July, about 40 minutes into which the two happened to see someone riding one of the company’s bikes. The two-person team did a quick U-turn and pulled aside the person to find that the bike’s GPS system was disabled, indicating that it had been stolen.
> The man riding the bike gave it back without a fuss, claiming that he had bought it at a local street market.
What were some of the characteristics of that man that led Yeung and Carmody to guess that he was riding a stolen bike and not one he owned?
If I drive a car somewhere, park it in a parking space and lock the doors, I have very high confidence that my car will be there when I get back. Probably won't get vandalised or damaged either. I could even leave something in the car and it probably won't be smashed and grabbed as long as it's not in plain sight.
If I ride my bike somewhere, lock the frame to a bike stand with a sturdy U-lock and leave it there for an extended period of time, I don't feel confident that it will be there, or that it won't be somehow fiddled with. Even if they don't get the whole bike, they might run off with the tyres, or the battery if they manage to dislodge that.
I could easily ride my bike to the nearest commuter train station, park it there and continue my way downtown. Would be a lot faster than taking the bus there. However, if I'm gone for a couple of hours, I don't feel safe parking the bike at the station. I wouldn't feel this way with a car. Same comes to parking at home. I feel absolutely nothing about parking my car outside my apartment, but I'm not confident in having the bike parked outside for more than 10 minutes.
And I feel like this way even though I've never had my bike stolen and I don't live anywhere particularly dodgy. Just having people around me having had their bikes stolen make me feel this way.
1) Bike registry 2) Visual plaque stating bike is registered
These two things make a bike less attractive to steal, and give the city the tools to actually prosecute stolen property cases and reunite owners with their goods. Nothing is perfect but this is a gain for bike riders.
If you have the inclination, a proper, heavy chain is better than a D-lock - both should be impervious to bolt-cutters, but a D-lock can be forced open/broken with a jack and a chain usually cannot. Also a chain is more difficult to cut with an angle grinder as it moves about and might break the cutting disk.
If you're talking about trips in addition to the commute to the office, the considerations really depend on the location. The sturdier the lock the better, but in many cases, a superior lock out of view could be considered worse security than a lesser lock with more eyes on.
You'd be well-advised to secure, in addition to the frame, components like wheels and seat, especially if they're quick release. For that, a lighter cable (maybe even one with a built-in combo lock) might suffice as deterrent, but again, it depends. Some of our opportunistic friends seem to be more interested in wheels than frames.
> Appears to Succeed Where the City Doesn’t
Pretty aggressive framing given that bikes generally havent had gps trackers builtin before. Police wouldnt have any experience trying to get such things back, yet, given the new-ness, but these people have both time & some experience.
https://www.kron4.com/news/video-san-francisco-police-set-up...
That said, my experience echos yours -- I'm a bike commuter in Seattle and ride by 3 open-air bike chop shops on my way to the office, all literally adjacent to bike paths. Pretty uncomfortable.
I feel like there is a cultural issue going on with west coast law enforcement where its like they don't want to deal with the paperwork or the effort of actually doing their job. It was telling when some LAPD got in trouble recently for playing pokemon go and ignoring dispatch calls to go after a snorelax (1). But just anecdotally I see general terrible work ethic from the cops. I see them abuse signal preemption all the time for nothing. When they are out directing traffic in downtown LA for some random construction road pattern they usually have an airpod in one ear, which I'm positive they aren't allowed to do. You call about a petty crime and the reaction is almost like "Did someone die? No? What do you want me to do then?"
1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5q593/lapd-officers-ignore-...
It's not uncommon to hear about people losing something like a smartphone to a thief, know where it is due to GPS tracking, and police just won't do anything with that information.
The situation has changed though, and they certainly deserve criticism for failing to change their attitude.
1) Receiving stolen property is illegal, and the bike is still property of the original owner and they can take it back anytime. The person riding it is culpable to the extent that they knew it was a shady deal, which can range from "Not at all, but stuck holding the bag of having to sue the thief for fraud for selling them a stolen bike" to "Charged in conspiracy". There's a big range there, but as it's incredibly hard to prove if they were found riding it around, they probably just lose the bike. If they are found with it in a chop shop... that's a different story.
2) Selling someone something with the intent to steal it back is fraud. If you have a receipt from the seller, you can tell VanMoof to fuck off, or surrender the bike to them and sue in small claims court. VanMoof doesn't want to deal with that and will roll over fairly quickly. The (fraudulent) first owner will be very easy to find because they have a contract with VanMoof. They can probably pull this scam once without repercussions, but VanMoof will, presumably, quickly turn over evidence to your police report of the scam to avoid ruining their reputation.
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/0b/fc/d6/0bfcd63b9e49a7da0ba1f9333...
The lock itself / the GPS cartridge itself is structurally integral to the bike.
If by destroying it, perhaps the bottom bracket could get a pin released to freeze it when the circuit quits responding.
There are still other problems with that approach. VanMoof currently lets you unlock your phone with your bike, rather than requiring a constant connection, which seems like the right balance.
Unlock your bike with your phone?
the google bus did a quick U turn and did an illegal terry stop to find that the pixel 6's third party cookies had been disabled, indicated that it had been stolen