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Comment by Karsteski | Hacker News Reader

I could not even imagine the police getting off their butts to do anything about a stolen bike, much less going along with a regular person's investigation. Great work, I wish more police were willing to actually do things when members of the public take the initiative

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Police actually often do retrieve stolen bikes! Not most of the time, and not because stealing a bike is a crime, and not because they know it's stolen. In the US, if one or more bikes are in the posession of the (ahem) kind of person that your local police have motivation to shake down, they may be confiscated if they're in that person's possession when they do.

If the bike is valuable enough to be worth the effort, it will eventually be listed for sale by the police, usually through an "unclaimed property" continuous auction system. If the bike doesn't clear whatever value/revenue threshold that is, it'll be scrapped or donated and that's that, or sometimes it'll end up bundled with a bunch of other low value things as a single auction item.

If your bike is valuable enough to generate revenue greater than the expense of auction logitics and is stolen in the US, pay attention to police auctions in your general area and it's likely to turn up. Sometimes they'll skip the sale and give it to you if you have documentation proving that it's yours, sometimes they want you to point them to the police report you filed saying it was stolen. Sometimes they'll lol and you have to pay up anyway.

Yeah this is an amazing story. The only bike theft I've ever heard of where the police actually did something.

It does reconfirm just how little they care about bike theft though - literally all they had to do was email the thief and he would come to them! But no even that is too much work.

The frustrating thing is that if the police even occasionally stung bike thieves, theft would likely decrease disproportionately. Something about not having total impunity…

They do that in NL, google 'lokfiets'. In NL stealing a bike puts you at roughly the same level as a horse thief in the Wild West. We just don't hang them from trees. Unfortunately here too the police is often too busy with more important work to go after stolen bikes but since the really bad days (the 80's) bike theft here has definitely gone down. I still wouldn't leave a high value bike (say a newish e-bike or a nice racer) out of my sight though.

Fwiw, the police helped me successfully recover my kid’s stolen bike and arrested the thief/seller as soon as I ID’d our bike at the “meet-up.”

It’s easy to over generalize.

YMMV - I see zero help with home burglaries let alone stolen bikes. Depends on a lot of factors, just sucks you pay taxes for no benefits.

Depends where you live. SF you are getting a laugh. Tiny rural town you are getting the sherif and his full effort.

100% but I think people in bigger cities probably pay more in taxes (Im literally assuming) and get way less for their money. I know the city I live in, I get not a lot in terms of civic duty for what I fund and just accept crime and theft as a perk of living where I do.

South Bay (area) suburbs.

Yeah here in Germany you would be laughed out of the police station or the police would get aggressive with you and accuse you of committing a crime

Ummm no? Two weeks ago I saw a guy trying to steal a bike and called the police. Three police cars arrived within 3 minutes and they tried to find him for at least 30 minutes based on my description.

Maybe it's a Hamburg thing then. Everyone I know who has tried to report a crime here in Hamburg has been interrogated and harassed by the police

there's a huge difference between catching the thieves in the act and trying to get your bike back afterwards. Actually, I have experienced both cases: Once my brother saw how thieves were trying to steal a bike and informed the police, who acted. Another time I saw my stolen bike basically 300m next to a police station and went there and everything they said was: We don't have policemen here who have time for this. And all I could think (I was a teenager then): WHAT? You are at the reception and not doing anything... I didn't think about stealing it back, though.... (both cases were in Bergedorf ;))

any idea what the price tag on the bike was? im in US and we have a threshold of value, beyond which it is a very serious crime.

Pretty much trash, maybe $100

Ummm no is randomly sassy.

Accusing the victims or just flat-out covering crime seems to be a common practice over there, at least for things much worse than property crimes [0] [1] [2].

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cologne-poli...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35231046

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-fn0yCdqHg

Apparently you might get lucky.

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