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Comment by BashiBazouk | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I had a bicycle stolen. I had registered the bike with the city as "required" had filled out a police report with license number and serial number. Found the bike locked up in town on a Friday night. Flagged down a police officer and told him about the bicycle theft, police report and had a copy of the paperwork with all the relevant info. Cops reply: I can't get a locksmith out until Monday. Went home and got a wire cutter as the bike had a flimsy lock and stole it right back. Even if you do all the work for them, cops are useless for bicycles...

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This is entirely dependent on what city you live in and who you elect to local leadership positions.

My brother's bike was stolen in college when he lived in Logan Utah. As a non-native he was shocked to find that the cops put out a description of the stolen bike immediately and it was spotted and returned within hours. I believe an arrest was also made.

There's no reason we just need to accept that you can steal anything you like and nobody will care. This is a direct response to the people we're putting in power.

Logan is >80% Mormon. Indeed, when you have high-trust, high-IQ, low-crime demographics, it becomes a lot more practical to address property crimes - there aren't very many of them, and there aren't many serious crimes higher up the todo list.

It has some, but not all, to do with the people in power. The demographics of a city like NYC are such that you would have to 10x police expenditures and radically expand police powers to get property crime down to those of places like Logan.

this is very interesting. when I first heard the condition: one religion control everything from government to local community and companies, I think it should be terrible, but I so frequently heard about how they are so good at system.

Theocracy has been tried, it has a few drawbacks.

Is there some reason to think the median Mormon has a higher IQ than the median American?

I think high trust and low population density has a lot more to do with it.

around 1996 I had my bike, locked up on campus at my University, stolen from a campus bike rack, by the campus police, in essentially a new-employee fuckup. My bike was in the database, labelled, serial number registered.

So i reported it stolen, they facepalmed and said they took it off a campus bike rack (cutting the lock), and sold it, with others, at a campus auction.

I found it locked up at the engineering library some time later, but it was beat to shit by the person who had bought it, whereas i'd taken care of it (it was 15ish years old when stolen) like something expensive that i couldn't even afford when grandparents bought it for me.

Total goofup all around.

So they just take bikes that arnt registered with them? That seems very aggressive and strange to me to begin with. I've never heard of trying to tax bycicles like that.

University is the key. They're often trying to deal with absolute masses of bikes but even so this sounds like an overreach (and probably should have been handled via small claims court or similar).

Yep it was a mistake, and they admitted such. I thought of small claims but for a then old 10 speed bike no longer made, i figured i'd squander more time and effort than the cost of replacing it.

Small claims court is self serve, no lawyer needed. It's as simple as filling out a form and plonking down $75 or so. And you can add that fee to the damages so it costs you nothing.

that i did not know at all!

And usually it results in either the company completely ignoring you (you get a default judgement in your favor) or they just write you a check to make you go away.

My bike was clearly registered with them. It had a clear sticker on it too, besides serial number. It was just a noob mistake, gone haywire.

I have a similar story - I had a bike that was lost for a few years, then a friend recognized it in a pile of about 50 stolen bikes in a basement nearby. The cops were useless for other than getting me inside the building. Luckily the thief was too lazy/stupid to set the code on the lock (it was still 0-0-0), so I was able to just remove it and take my bike back.

> Even if you do all the work for them, cops are useless for bicycles...

It's not just bicycles.

Anyone who thinks cops will help recover stolen items has never had an item stolen.

If you're really lucky you might get a call back someday on a car.

From what I've heard, you usually don't want a stolen car back. The thieves will not be taking good care of it.

Oh, sure, and sometimes you luck out (if you had insurance) where you get the claim payout and get to keep the crap car (because insurance doesn't want to bother with it). But that's rare.

Why you wanted the government to live your life for you in the first place is beyond me.

In what way is expecting police to solve crimes same as "wanting government to live your life"?

Isn't it the same government that made vigilantism illegal?

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