Where do stolen bikes go?
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
They used to produce monthly videos of bike recovery operations, though it looks like they've stopped the videos so you'll have to scroll past a few years of promo videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vanmoof
Often they recover the bike from a yard / homeless camp / shop with 100s of other non-VanMoof bikes they leave behind. It would be so easy to crack down on organised bike theft. The financial, social, and environmental costs of securing bikes and recovering from a theft is huge.
I'd guess part of their motivation is to dissuade theft and resale of their bikes, which are quite distinctive. Though that might be attributing too much rationality to a bike thief.
I don't think taking a photo will have any actionable follow-up—I have no way of following up to see if someone reports to see anyone has reported a stolen bike in the area—but might make a thief decide to go find a different target, while not being a major issue if you're the actual owner.
As a healthy, medium-large guy who's okay at de-escalation, I live in the assumption that no one will try to hurt me for interfering. I'll probably learn better one day.
Of course, it's quite possible that the Average Bike Thief in Amsterdam is a well-organized criminal-for-hire kind of person, doing surgical strikes against the most valuable bikes and so on (as is often the case with car theft, afaik). Then perhaps an angle grinder is just standard Day 1 equipment.
As ever, impossible to stop a determined thief, but starting to get "good enough".
Well police helped him recover the bike without arresting anyone and told him next time he should just steal it back and don't bother them.
For example, in Sweden, if it's been more than 24 hours, it's illegal to do it on your own.
The new "owner" will keep the bike as he has bought it in good faith. The shop will claim that it cannot check every used bike. The rightful owner could try to get money from the person who stole it (if found), but they most likely don't have any money.
It's the perfect crime and the reason why we cannot have nice bikes. People are literally sleeping with their expensive bikes in a room.
However as soon as you as the buyer feel something is off, you aren't protected anymore because only good faith buyers are protected. For example if you go to the black market or something seems to be extremely cheap you definitively aren't protected anymore.
It's a conflict of interests. This law is trying to do a tradeoff. Imagine you went to Walmart and bought a bike and everything seemed fine but it turned out that an employee stole the bike and sold it to you in the name of Walmart. In this case you can keep the bike.
No stolen bikes end up in shops, no siree. Yeah right.
Of course this depends on the police not being lazy which clearly is a big ask but if that is too much any law is pointless.
Calling cops and doing it with their help covers your ass.
During COVID there were plenty of officers available to fine normal people who were sitting too close on a bench. But to deal with real criminals who talk back is too much of a hassle.
This brings up an interesting legal question.
Is it illegal to steal back your own property? Even if you trespass onto private property to do so, the person would have to get the Police involved to do anything about that, at which time you can say "Sure, I'll take the trespassing charge, and while we're here I'm leaving with all of my property".
Strangely there are jurisdictions where if your stuff is in a pawn shop and the pawnbroker claims he didn't know it was stolen, he might have the legal right to recoup what he paid for it from you!
Donuts are now over $14/dozen each where I live. Another casualty of inflation I guess.
Our police had a policy of not attending house burglaries with odd street numbers to cut their required response rate in half. I can't imagine them even answering the phone over a bike.
The only reason i would call the police is to get a reference number for an insurance claim.
I had a bicycle stolen, and after filing the report the police phoned me to ask for more details on the lock I'd used.
I later found it on Gumtree, with a description ending something like "Call Peter on 07123456789, meet at Forest Heath Station". Putting the mobile phone number into Gumtree's search brought up about 50 bicycles, "Call John" "Call Dave" etc. I emailed this to the police, and had another phone call thanking me for my incredible investigation skill.
They said they would go to find Peter/John/Dave, but would only contact me again if they found my bike, which they did not.
I'm very suspicious of accounts like [2] "Mr T" with "Cash only" and a huge selection of bicycles.
[1] https://www.bikeregister.com/news/putting-a-value-on-protect...
[2] https://www.gumtree.com/profile/accounts/48e9b2ff00d3f04e27f... or similarly https://www.gumtree.com/profile/accounts/b8b756750f2960d115b...
Counter-Terrorism Patrol Unit.
IME speculation: for security-adjacent personnel, recovery efforts (equipment, fraud, etc.) are a great way to quantify the work you do when you don't otherwise generate revenue. You can't take credit for disrupting events that didn't happen [because you intervened], but nobody can argue with you recovering or clawing back $x in lost/stolen assets.
They were probably tasked with patrolling for misplaced explosives and other drama, but since incident count is low, they were given supplementary tasks (like tagging bikes they come across on patrol) to justify their salary and foster positive PR.
Driving a bicycle while intoxicated is also treated just like driving a car.
Electric bikes going 25km an hour or faster, or have larger than a 250watt battery needs to be registered as a motor vehicle. You’ll need a driver’s license, insurance, etc.
You might need to do something else though - e.g. trespass or cut someone else's lock etc. You are on my shaky ground then I think.
It is a little different but on one occasion, in France, some guy sold a computer online, sent it, and never got paid. Pissed off, he broke in the crook house and took back his computer (plus a few other things, not smart...), they both sued each other, the crook ended up in prison for 2 months, and the one who broke into his house had 4 months suspended sentence. But even if he just took back his computer, he would still be guilty, but the judge would most likely have handed out a lighter sentence.
* You pay $400 for 3 years of coverage. * Must have the bike locked and file a police report. * They can choose whether or not to attempt recovery. * If they choose not to, or fail to recover the bike, they'll replace it. * Up to 3 replacements are covered in the 3 years.
So it's really just theft insurance but they can attempt to recover low-hanging fruit. In wonder what their attempted recovery rate is.
It really worked unexpectedly well, I've heard a lot of skepticism and I don't know how things are at VanMoof but if the will is there it really works
The VanMoof or Tweakers forums are filled with users talking about the repairs the did this week to their bike, or that they send their bike back since it broke the week they bought it.
The problem is that Dutch police are a narco-state dysfunctional hellhole. They don't do anything that goes after organized crime... they even cut the team dealing with the gangs behind ATM explosions in Germany [1].
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/geldautomaten-sprengung...
I am sure the bike hunters exist but it wouldn’t surprise me if much of their work is PR.
He got off, very politely handed me back my bike, and thanked me for letting him borrow it.
Almost made me feel like I was the bad guy in the situation. Anyway I guess in some cases, a stolen bike doesn't go far at all.
Many people who choose to live outside square-lawed society rely on people remaining docile and sticking to principle in order to prey on them, or at least to live a lifestyle where they don't have to collaborate with larger society to reap its rewards. It took me years to un-program "assume good intent and empathy" with people I didn't know that were trying to take advantage of me.
I simply can't stand thieves. I wish that we had really great public services and transportation--not only would this reduce a huge amount of current theft, it would make actual theft obviously inexcusable.
We all tell ourselves stories (whether true or not) to process our actions and their consequences. For people who have been victimized, they sometimes become a slave to the story they tell themselves which can lead to learned helplessness.
(This includes mental illness and addiction--even if we mentally those people as being in the grip of something beyond themselves, if a peaceful, non-grifting society is desired someone needs to make choices about how to restrict their freedom.)
Criminals are criminals often because they can't obtain the higher return than comes from having a) impulse control and b) greater IQ than a toaster.
One day - gone! I breathed a sigh of relief and went about my day. Two years pass. I'm walking to class one day on the same campus and I see a very similar looking bike on the rack. I walked up to inspect it and it was definitely the same bicycle, but entirely fixed up! All new components, nice tires, the works, with a nice lock.
I'll never know what happened in the interim but it was such a warm fuzzy feeling to think someone had cared for it and elevated it to a new level, even if it was technically the product of theft. In a ship of Theseus kind of way it wasn't even truly my bike anymore.
The whole situation has stuck in my brain a lot better than the classes I was attending....
Behold, the bicycle of Theseus. If you stole it back could you say "arguably, this isn't theft!"? But I guess a judge would say you stole the parts of the bike that the new owner fitted.
That account recovery created some interesting ethical questions.
I imagine your bike was stolen by someone, maybe fixed up, maybe sold as-is for cheap and then fixed up by the new possesor, who may not have known it was stolen, just cheap.
Helps to ride a $100 bike. If somebody ends up with it, they won't be too attached.
> politely handed me back my bike
Canada?
So they had "liberated" the bike (it was locked up), and immediately headed out of town. I'm sure it was scouted, then they came back in the small hours to steal it. I'm convinced that it was an organized operation, and the bike might have been stolen to order.
When it stopped moving, I could see it was located in the back of a house in a Birmingham suburb. So I rang the Oxford police.
They weren't interested - they told me to contact West Midlands police. So I rang them. No, they were not going to investigate: "Don't you realize how many Porsches are stolen in this city every day?" Also, they said they can't just walk in and have a look around (I guess they need a warrant, which is fair enough; but then why not get a warrant?)
Like, I knew the address it was located at; so maybe the WM police would provide an officer to protect me, when I head up to Brum to collect the machine? No way.
So I gave up. My replacement has no GPS tracker.
So my experience seems to differ from the Amsterdam narrative. I had heard that most stolen bikes end up in Birmingham. My anecdote appears to confirm that bikes stolen in Oxford don't stay in Oxford.
This is a truly horrible state of affairs. Case in point, this is unfortunately super common in Canada: [1] (these stories might shock you) https://www.kruselaw.ca/library/using-reasonable-force-to-de... [2] https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1230/index... [3] https://whatthelaw.com/blog/self-defence-laws-in-canada-myth...
Canada takes Christ’s Sermon on the Mount message of “do not resist an evil person” (https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-39.htm) into the reality of practical applied law, by punishing those who defend themselves.
I had a similar experience where I followed a bike thief to his home, again police not interested.
Police forces in the UK have various campaigns where they will, for example, spend a month targeting a particular crime or social nuisance. With much fanfare press releases will be issued about how many people were charged with not wearing a seatbelt whilst driving, for example, and for the rest of the year not wearing a seatbelt will be relegated back to being ignored again.
The default excuse for this behaviour is lack of resources due to Govt cutbacks, which sounds fair until something interesting happens and suddenly 1000 police cars appear from nowhere.
I told my councillor who lives on the same street. They spoke to the community officer about it, they put two CSO's (Police Community Support Officer. Civilians dressed like police, no power of arrest!) in a car to watch the place. A few days later it was raided at 5am by a huge force.
It really matters who you are!
All police are civilians. Don't let them tell you otherwise.
> one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
I've never been to Oxford but I'm guessing it has a lower density of bicycles per square meter than Amsterdam. Presumably it's easier for stolen bikes to 'blend in' in Amsterdam?
There are two universities, and countless EFL schools and other schools; and students visiting Oxford are strongly discouraged from bringing cars. The universities have about 60,000 students between them (in a town whose permanent population is 140,000).
So Oxford has a LOT of bikes.
Bikes are everywhere in Oxford, probably due to the Uni
Which also explains why the 2K electric bike is taken somewhere else – if you tried to sell it in the same town there's higher chances the owners find out about it (like from a Facebook posting) and involve the police. Understanding that the police don't work super well across district lines seems to have solved this problem for the thieves here (and created problems for everyone else instead).
I've seen/heard this numerous times. Cops really don't give a shit about theft unless it's from a business. But I wonder if you could just sue the homeowner for the bike in small claims court. Do you have something like that in your jurisdiction? I mean you can prove they're in possession of your property. Nothing criminal, just have a judge order them to at least compensate you for the bike.
To be pedantic, I can only prove they're in possession of the GPS tracker. That cost about £250.
Yes, we have small claims. I think it costs about £50. I'd love to have (partially) got my own back; but I was very much conscious that these people might not be very nice people, and they knew where I lived.
I could have hired thieves to steal it back, I suppose; but I don't know any thieves that I trust (nor that I don't trust!)
I doubt they would have contested it; it would have been an easy win. But they might have paid me a visit and set fire to my flat.
I do have a big problem with the police ignoring cases handed them on a sliver platter even if they are minor, though. Doing this makes it effectively legal to commit said crime.
Yeah. The same thing happens with bankster's frauds. The difference is that a fraud case is very costly to investigate and prosecute; in this case, as you put it, I gave it to them on a silver platter.
And I'd bet that they'd have recovered dozens of expensive bikes if they'd raided it, and solved at least dozens of open cases.
If the chances of getting caught for this sort of crime were non-zero, even if the repercussions were a heavy fine, it would hopefully make people think twice before getting involved in it.
Let's say you finally manage to impound his car. Now there's an article about how people's lives are being ruined because of fines and mere misdemeanors. We're back to square one.
Yeah, I know, that might just be shifting the problem - he could take up online fraud, or burglary, or mugging instead.
My only experience with police and bike theft is the opposite; they police were helpful and recovered my bike. When I first called them they even suggested that I make initial contact with the thief and they’d be there to support the sting, which surprised me a lot! I found the bike a couple of weeks after it was stolen when the thief posted it for sale online, and when I called the police they let me know that the phone number was associated with a “known operator”. I didn’t end up making direct contact with the thief, an undercover officer took care of it. Several officers joined, and they were all super happy to have helped. It was overall a positive and satisfying experience.
This may be very locale-dependent, I’m in the western U.S., not Europe.
I called the number, and they told me to meet up somewhere in a relatively rough neighborhood. I told them I would love to meet up in front of a police precinct which they turned down, saying they don't have a car and can't get there (told them they can ride the bike to the precinct, and I can arrange an Uber to drive them back but unsurprisingly they said no).
I called the Seattle PD and told them everything, asked if they can help me by sending someone at the meeting site. They pretty much burst out laughing, told me not to go as I will likely get robbed or worse, forget about the bike and move on with my life. (I did file a report for the stolen bike though).
I ended up getting some money from my renter's insurance. The bike was worth slightly over $1000 when it was new (was stolen after about a year). I keep my bikes indoors now.
I'm not from the US and I've only ever had positive interactions with police, but cases like this which would be low effort for them and have a useful impact on petty crime in their region, seem very frustrating.
That's an SPD[1] problem. As a department, its worse then useless.
[1] Not that they are some weird outlier in this regard among US police forces.
Re-read your post and it is seattle, I knew it!
To further clarify, unless it’s a business that makes routine donations to the police department.
Police started out as private business protection for those who paid, mafia style, and they haven’t changed since then.
as a resident? if I call the non-emergency line they just laugh and tell me to move.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...
Not sure about other jurisdictions.
On top of that, police staffing levels are at historic lows in some cities- in Seattle, they're at a 30-year low.
If someone isn't in immediate danger, and the situation isn't evolving, the item stolen is particularly mobile and difficult to identify (such as a commodity bike), and not worth a lot of money (cars worth much more are stolen every day) it's going to be way at the bottom of their priority list.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/wa/seattle/crime
Over 46k crimes (property and violent)
1200 officers funded, though I've seen other stats that there are only 940 active employed
800k 911 calls per year
https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department...
That's 3-ish 911 responses per day, assuming an average of one officer for every call. Add on top of that all of the other things happening, and you would need to be wilfully blind to believe they are sitting around with nothing better to do than look for a stolen bike.
So going off reported crimes, we have 1/10 of a crime per officer per day, or maybe better put, 1 crime per 10 days per officer. So tell me more about how they’re not twiddling their thumbs. Even accounting for administrative work (court appearances, paperwork, etc), that is a ridiculously low crime response rate.
Edit: Also, there's more that police do than administrative paperwork and investigating crime. I'd hazard a guess that a plurality, if not a majority, of police officers on any given shift are walking a beat, patrolling, enforcing traffic laws (i.e. speed limits), car crashes, etc.
They might show up to a car crash, though.
12th on burglary, 13th on larceny, 40th on motor vehicle theft, 14th 'total' out of 100 US cities.
51st on violent crime, though, so surely, there should be plenty of police resources that aren't devoted on homicides and assaults and drug violence, and other things of that nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Have had my place of home and work both burglarized. The difference is that at work they show up, take tons of notes, interview you and your employees, and then ignore you.
I vastly prefer the home burglary experience. At least they're honest about not caring. Both times I had 1080p footage with clear vision of the thieves and cars. Jack shit done about it.
Rinse, repeat, and most people don't even report crimes anymore. Tada! Crime is now "going down."
US states with the death penalty have significantly higher murder rates than those without...
They have limited resources, and can not go after every criminal, even if it's a slam dunk case.
Interesting legal gymnastics would required to make it legal for a Detroit automaker to do this, but not an individual. However, such gymnastics are sadly common these days and wouldn’t surprise me.
It'd be nice to see e-bikes that just go into full generator mode when they're reported stolen; a bike that you can't petal is useless.
Failing to take measures to prevent a breach of the peace that they had been warned about would be bad publicity, at best.
But I'm not inclined to take on cops and robbers at the same time. Like a circular gunfight, except with me in the middle.
If you did tell the police that you were going to take the law into your own hands, what would happen?
2) you'd be arrasted, or at the very least told that if you do that, you will be in trouble.
Not necessarily. I think just carrying a weapon might make the other party more likely to cooperate. Even if you don't take it out.
But I bet that if you did that police would show up as there is an implied threat of violence. I mean, clearly it applies even in OP's case, since police did show up - I'm just surprised he didn't get in trouble for basically using the police as his personal bodyguards by implying things will get violent.
It's hard to put into words, but as a Texan, I can see how police would react exactly like they did. No guarantees, especially for minorities, it could go very badly, but the whole situation isn't surprising to me at all as a Texas native.
Your way is better.
You'll have officers there pretty sharpish :)
Then while in Oxford they'd spend a few days hoovering up students' unlocked bikes into a van, then drive over to Cambridge...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BAbike/comments/8mmrne/stolen_bike_...
I know lots of people who bought their own bike back at some point in life, and even more who never bought a bike from anyone other than someone like this. Bike theft in NL really is the pettiest of petty crimes and I'm confused about what makes MIT, of all places, decide to try and figure this out.
A number of my friends have had $10-30k of bikes stolen. Based on the surrounding circumstances, at least some, if not most, were targeted by an organized set of individuals and not just random.
> The scholars found that still another 22 of the bikes made such sufficiently similar movements that they seemed to be part of the same “subnetwork” of bikes.
> This research makes it clear that part of bicycle theft is organized.
Beyond learning specific things about the flow of stolen bikes in Amsterdam, the research is part of a broader body of work by Senseable City Lab that uses these trackers to try to understand the flow of physical goods through complicated/emergent systems.
"Waar heeft u het rijwiel zelf gestolen?"
Which translates as:
"Where did you steal the bike yourself?"
So at least in Amsterdam this fact was common knowledge ;)
It isn't rare at all to have your bike stolen and the less fortunate have a choice of buying a new one or a second hand one, and that second hand one my be of questionable provenance. Bought on a bridge was an expression when I lived in Amsterdam.
I've yet to have a bike stolen but I've always been completely paranoid about it taking my bike into stores and apartments :) This is a lot easier with a Brompton than with my current bike though.
During the 90s the stories were about heroin junkies selling bikes for 25 NLG (11.34 EUR). Clearly not the type of people with the organizational skills to set up an international crime syndicate.
These were stories, and it's good/interesting to check in case they were wrong, but the results are as one would expect.
(Another common observational joke about inner city bikes is that the value of the locks commonly exceed the value of the bikes they lock.)
I saw a post-War Italian movie a while back in which the main character was lucky to get a job placing advertising posters around the city. He only got the job because he had a bike. While doing the job his bike was stolen. He tried to steal another so he could keep working to support his family, but was caught in the act and thrown in jail. I can't remember the name of the movie.
Note attached to my uncle's thesis (he's a physics PhD): 'The sum of the weight of bicycle and lock is a constant.'
Found it:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/guy-successfully-hunts-down-his...
- whenever I pick up the bike to ride it after a long period of not using it (say overnight or after a day of work), the airtag starts ringing. I don’t know why it does that but it would for sure tip the thief off
- don’t iPhones and maybe androids now show some kind of notification and offer to disable the tag if a tag you don’t own starts following you? That would also prevent me from finding the bike
- AirTags don’t report their altitude, only their location. Good luck figuring out in which apartment and on which floor it’s kept. Police would most likely decline to help as they can’t search every apartment
If they are normal bikes, you would have to transport them in numbers, and it would be hard to explain it if you got caught. And you would need a van.
Best solution: steal local, sell local for fast turnover of minimal stocks.
I lost my bike twice in Cambridge: once found it around the corner and another in the police depo. So someone had just taken it to get somewhere.
Nobody will buy something covered in phone numbers without at least calling the number. The thief can't be bothered to repaint the whole bike to cover it. Hence, the bike is now worthless to a thief, so it won't get stolen.
Insurance is great for rare unpredictable events. It is not cost-effective at all for common predictable events.
Can you identify the insurer so I can short their stock?
It's not just high end bikes. It's everything. Motorcycles and scooters too.
There was an article in the local paper about bike thefts in 2019 and mentioned the Project 529 site which is one of the largest bike registries.
https://project529.com/garage/
From the 2019 article:
Bike theft is at a five-year high, and Police Department data obtained by the Star Tribune shows almost 4,300 bikes reported stolen since 2017.
The rash of thefts frustrates cyclists and police, who don’t always have time to track down stolen bikes amid other more serious calls. But for thieves, selling stolen bikes — some valued at more than $4,000 — can be a quick way to make hundreds of dollars.
https://www.startribune.com/bicycle-thefts-hit-five-year-hig...
I had no idea someone had started a Facebook group for stolen bikes called "Twin Cities Stolen Bikes" where people can go and report their bike and ask for help.
You leave your wallet on a restaurant table by accident it may well get stolen opportunistically. The thief may have limited or no history of theft. An opportunity merely presented itself. It could also be teenagers stealing a car for a joyride.
The second, bigger category is professional theft. Note that "professional" here is statement about skill or even organization. It's just done as a source of income. So when you see anything stolen at scale the first thing to consider is how easily is this converted into money because that's where the majority of it goes.
So for stolen bikes it surprises me not at all that they stay local. I imagine an awful lot of bikes are sold privately through predictable channels (eg Craigslist, FB Marketplace, flea markets). It may not even be pawn shops because those generally have ID requirements.
Higher end bikes may end up being shipped (eg [1]) because the more expensive and rarer (and thus more identifiable) a bike, the more risk in selling it locally and the harder it is to maybe find a buyer.
I'm actually surprised so many people report stolen bikes. Like what does this do, really? Is there really going to be an insurance claim? If it's thousands of dollars I would totally understand but most bikes are cheap. Interestingly I once had a garage door left open. An expensive mountain bike was stolen and they didn't bother taking my cheap piece of crap bike.
[1]: https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/report-reveals-pipeli...
Once my bike got stolen in the middle of the night in the city center. I searched for my bike the next day but could not find it. I reported it to the police, but did not expect much of it.
About a week later I received a phone call from the police telling me someone found my bike. Apparently this person was woken up in the middle of the night by someone trying to break open the bike lock under his bedroom window. He scared away the thief. Because the lock was damaged he put the bike in his shed. He put notes in mailboxes of all his neighbors to ask if someone was missing their bike. He got no response and thought: oh I might just tell the police; but I doubt it will help much.
Well it did! I was happy I reported it stolen that time.
People often demand decision makers to make good decisions, and to look at the data. But then we need to apply that data to them.
The cops obviously knew of it, as they would visit it regularly.
The cops eventually shut it down and it took the city a couple weeks to fully clean it out of all the refuse that was built up.
https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2014/10/this-i...
100? Only takes that many to wreck society?
I mean once someone learns they are successful at stealing one without repercussions and reselling it, why would they stop and not turn it into a living?
Now do a study on that somehow because I am really curious if it is 100 or 1,000
(Not actually an industrial laser)
My friend had an expensive electric bike. It got stolen. He's a teacher but his wife is a well paid doctor.
He posted somewhere that the bike was stolen. Surprisingly, someone contacted him and told him they found it.
It was really strange the way the "finder" offered to return it. They had them meet them in another suburb 30 minutes away. They requested a substantial reward. The whole thing was strange.
It makes me think that there are people who live in a grey economy that steal bikes because they aren't hurting someone in the same way that breaking into a house or stealing a car would hurt someone (or worse). Bikes are a luxury good at the high end, and that's what my friend lost.
Bike thievery is a gateway to a decent income when you have no other choices. At least that's what it seemed like when my friend had that experience. It seemed like it was a well thought out scam that was done by someone with intelligence and desperation.
I was able to track it for a little while via the tile app, but it eventually stopped being available. Would have been such a cool story to get it back.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/kiwis-on-a-mission-to-find-ele...
I mentioned how many bikes I saw on hand, and he proudly told me that since his inception about 20 years ago he had auctioned off more than 1 MILLION stolen bicycles.
1 million stolen bikes, retrieved by police in Ontario alone in the past 20 years.
That's incredible.
Imagine how many bikes have been stolen and not recovered by the police.
Law enforcement had more in one place than I ever saw.
Going to police auctions probably the thing they have the most of is recovered bikes that had never been returned to their owners.
And the buyers were regulars, many pawnbrokers who you could tell normally purchase continuously directly from thieves, picking them up super cheap in quantity whenever the cops do have them on offer.
And the cops completely aware the whole time.
At a different time, I was a theft victim from a music rehearsal space, where a guy left town with some of our nice gear when I was on vacation. Leaving behind some of his ratty things, but people figured out who he was right away, then found some pawn tickets and a couple were my items.
I went to that pawnshop and they had not loaned him much so I just bought them back. But there were two big speakers and one amp that I had no ticket for and a couple other guys were victims too. We made police reports with our serial numbers and the cops said they have a good relationship with the pawnbrokers and a very effective system to see if any recent loans were documented to these exact items. Everything was by the book.
One guy did get a speaker back that the cops found in a different pawnshop, but I kept checking for months and my stuff never turned up.
Until a couple years later when I got a call from a detective who wanted evidence on that same perpetrator in a more serious crime. Turned out the cops had my recovered amplifier for quite some time, and it was about to be auctioned off and surely he knew it would go cheap. But he wanted to know the original purchase prices so he could file enhanced charges needed to apprehend the thief immediately. I gave him the information and he faxed me the paperwork I needed to pick up my amp from their property department before the deadline. I was well aware that if this new violation had not come up, I would never have seen my amp again.
Never did find the speakers until a couple more years later I was watching a new band play at a local joint and sure enough, they had these uncommon series speakers right up front, and I discreetly checked them out and it was surely the ones my brother bought when he was a teenager and I had been deeply familiar with for years, with distinctive wear & tear. That I had faxed the original receipt to the cops that time.
But I decided not to say anything because it was a good band, and they were making better use of them than we would be doing by then. Plus they had replaced the horns with some more professional grade, these stout old boxes were sounding better than ever.
It's a problem so old, some of the first auteur films in cinema, "Bicycle Thief" was based on that problem.
If you can pick up something with your hands, how do you stop it from being so easily stolen?
The ebike battery provides power and weight for the personal transport vehicle to incorporate keys, trackers, and a bit more weight so it can't be moved with a single hand, but still, the issue is out there:
- we need embedded serial numbers in the major components (battery, frame)
- tracking / pinging that can be turned on for theft tracking like they did here
- removable batteries (recharge where you are, make the most valuable part of the e-vehicle more securable)
- integrated U-lock that isn't so effing annoying to use (cryptographic key on your phone) and isn't easily defeated by liquid nitrogen or other means
well, yeah, and make it cheap. I think there's a lot of opportunity for innovation in these platforms to solve/counter these age-old bicycle thief problems.
But a lot of it might be to get municipal policing policy to address them under the (flawed, but not totally) broken window theory. Take bicycle and ebike theft more seriously, it will help enable the transformation of cities in safety, use, convenience, and environmental efficiency.
When I passed through Amsterdam for the first time I recall looking at the many bikes at the bike racks and thinking how old fashioned they all looked, I think it is still the same now.
There's a lot going on with the typical bike population on a college campus.
A fair amount of bikes get stolen on the way home from a party or whatever, and left in a shrubbery or whatever. These bikes tend to get picked up by the school and sold at the reuse store. Some bikes have probably done that loop more than once, especially because these bikes are often not so great, and the line between "stolen" and "community" blurs a bit.
Unregistered/expired bikes also end up in the reuse store, which is also pretty common.
Police don't do anything and FBI isn't going to get involved.
But I wonder if one could put an RFID tag inside the frame some where ?
And I wonder if you have a steel frame would that interfere with it ?[0]: https://www.bicycode.org/pages-1/Documents_PDF/plaquette__Bi...
[1]: https://www.bicycode.org/faire-marquer-son-velo.rub-2/le-mar...
There are dedicated organizations that do these runs across Europe, to keep a low profile a wan with only 4 bikes will cross the border at a time.
The profits must be good enough to keep selling the bikes at half the price and continue doing these runs.
some women tracked her bike (it was a bait helped by a gps device company) and they uncovered a road from france to northern africa, it goes real quick
I’ve had funny looks from bored security guards but so far it’s always worked.
Guess people are afraid to go in rough neighborhood to retrieve their own property and police is not coming with them because they know they will have to use force to get job done. And when they actually use force, everyone including those whose property is stolen go up in arms, how can you do use that force? That is the simple reason police does not care. In cities like Baltimore and Minneapolis they even ignore shootings and murder because of woke agenda in the city as they know they will be punished for doing their jobs.
Well, may this be a lesson for those whose property is stolen and those who are shocked by no response from police, that going in rough parts of town and meeting criminals does not go very well with please and thankyou. You should be ready and willing to use force which most of the times is necessary.
I disagree, and think it’s quite telling that you feel this way. Most people I know would love for the police to do their job and use the force that they and only they are authorised to use (here in Aus) to retrieve stolen private property. But they don’t. Best they’ll do is file a report so you can claim it on insurance if you’re lucky enough to have it.