If it’s left anywhere in the open at anytime, you can repossess it legally as well. This happens with auto repossessions all the time. You don’t owe anyone an explanation as it’s yours - just take it if you can do so safely.
File a police report, go through the right channels. If you know its yours, call the police department non-emergency and explain the situation
A bunch of the other suggestions, here on HN Streetwise ProTips, can get self and/or friends beaten, stabbed, and/or arrested.
If you talk to them in person, it should be to get an idea of what they'll do, which may or may not have something to do with what's legal.
If you want legal advice, ask a lawyer with experience in the relevant area.
Probably they will verify that the bike is yours, and retrieve it, or they will say that they don't have the resources.
Are people imagining that the police will say that you can go take the bike, but then turn around and arrest you for theft?
Of course, if the police tell you "finders keepers; it's in the Constitution", then you can seek legal advice.
Police don’t usually investigate petty crimes.
People are imagining the police will tell you that you can't steal it back, when legally you can.
After all, it's the police's job to keep the peace. And things are more peaceful if I'm not busting up thieves' hideouts all guns blazing like Rambo.
Entrapment is reserved for the police going above and beyond, eg "sell me meth or I'll kill your dog" where it can be argued that the entrapped normally would not do the crime.
I still wouldn’t be very excited to try this defense in court.
No, this is about on duty police in uniform saying it's okay.
Working with that suspicion, especially given that this is HN, police saying "don't go steal it back" might still be very good advice, regardless of legal right.
For example (referring back to a scenario earlier in thread), I'm imagining a techbro crew, all jumping into one of their Teslas, and rolling up on misguided urban youth turf.
There's already a lot of misunderstanding and animosity, both ways, between stereotypes. And someone's attempt at "show of force" just escalated it. So, who will escalate the stupid further, and stab or draw a gun first.
"We cannot answer legal questions, please seek a lawyer for advise."
I don't do anything terribly interesting, so this was almost certainly not an issue actually worth paying $200 for a lawyer to answer.
the police will give you any advice, good or bad. They're not legally responsible for anything they said to you, as long as they're not telling you to commit a crime (in which case, if they did they will deny it).
You can still call 'em up of course - but don't 100% just trust their words blindly.
Not saying confronting thieves is for everyone. But it's not necessarily as physical as you think.
For the vast majority of people who live in reasonable cities, calling the police for something like that will get a timely response.
Many larger cities don't have the budget to provide adequate police coverage. So you get this sort of "best effort" response.
This is made worse with recent years of "defund the police" policies creeping into some of our larger cities.
It just reinforces the Pro 2A community's saying - when seconds matter, help is just minutes away.
Where I live the basic law/constitution establishes a protection duty of its citizens by the state (this includes their property). The police is one of the ways the state takes care of this duty. If the state is grossly negligent in this or even does nothing at all, the state may very well be on the hook to make the injured party whole. This responsibility is passed down and carried by individual police officers, and there have been cases of police officers being personally convicted of causing bodily harm for not dispatching a unit after a request for aid (despite them not personally swinging any punches)[1].
Generally you'll have police show up for near anything if they can.
[1] https://www.wz.de/panorama/nach-notruf-keine-streife-geschic...
During COVID, I called the non emergency line police for a break in on my car parked on the street and the police showed up in minutes then searched the area frantically to see if the guy was still around.
I don’t know if they are over funded or just bored.
It's great that you think _someone will handle that for you_ but it is probably a fantasy. Unfortunately you will probably need to self resolve. If you think it is going to escalate to violence, bring overwhelming force.
In my jurisdiction in the US it doesn’t matter if someone purchased the stolen goods or not, the goods still belong to the owner. This is sometimes called the "nemo dat" rule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_dat_quod_non_habet
The person buying the stolen goods would need to file a claim against the thief to recover their money, but the goods still belong to the original owner. And this is how it should be, since it’s added reason not to buy goods you suspect are stolen.
And yes, you should always try and work with the police first and foremost.
> however, in many cases, more than one innocent party is involved, making judgment difficult for courts and leading to numerous exceptions to the general rule that aim to give a degree of protection to bona fide purchasers and original owners
> The person buying the stolen goods would need to file a claim against the thief to recover their money
Generally as long as the purchase is made in good faith, you are wrong. It is the original owner that needs to file a claim against the thief.
Obviously, what constitutes a sale in "good faith" is a rather imprecise science, although one steady element is the sales price: it needs to have been appropriate for the item. So for example a mint bicycle or antique coin should sell near sticker price.
Not sure how US courts have interpreted this requirement but that’s the onus and I believe it rests on the third party buyer (to show absence of knowledge through evidence).
In that case the claim is against the thief only.
The next sentence is:
> The possession of the good of title will be with the original owner.
So you seem to be wrong there. The innocent buyer needs to file a claim against the thief, the original owner retails their title. It is explained in more detail later on.
The reason for this is so that if you buy a bicycle at, say, a bicycle fair and for a reasonable price, you shouldn’t have to worry about it being yoinked from under you later on.
Lawmakers have clarified this is choosing between two evils, there is no winning proposition here.
So, in conclusion: the original owner needs to file the claim, not the third party.
As anyone who has gone to law school will tell you, you can only acquire the title that the seller has. If seller stole the goods, he doesn't have any title, so he can't transfer title to a subsequent buyer. See, e.g. UCC § 2-403
There are exceptions when it comes to those who have voidable title (thieves do not have voidable title).
There are also cases where courts have more or less created exceptions close to those OP has described. For example, if Best Buy receives some stolen merchandise and sells it to good faith purchasers, courts have held that the victim needs to pursue the thief/Best Buy, not the end purchaser.
But generally, OP is wrong: if you buy a stolen bike at a flea market, you don't get title and the owner can get the bike back. Think of the policy implications if the rule was as OP claims. All thieves would have to do is immediately sell stolen goods and the owners could never get them back. That would be absurd.
You never asked.
https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0005291/2024-05-01 article 83 onward
> As anyone who has gone to law school will tell you
Sounds like you wasted $300 000 just to be wrong :)
> But generally, OP is wrong: if you buy a stolen bike at a flea market, you don't get title and the owner can get the bike back.
I said bike fair, not flea market.
I will reiterate: the sale needs to have been in good faith. All the conditions for that need to have been met.
"Our" legal system? Do you mean all common law countries or a particular one?
IIRC, they had a security hole on their payment page: they forgot to implement SCA (strong customer authentification, aka 2FA for payments). Had they done this, the liability would have shifted onto the bank/card issuer. For some reason they decided to go after the customers in vain resentment, were acquired and their product was discontinued.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nuraphone/comments/8iw3he/beware_on...
They apply the law as required to enforce the the socioeconomic order. This is why when people who aren’t custodians of land or cash flows ask them to investigate or solve crimes they rarely do.
The selective application of the law is how the current prerogatives of the ownership class are implemented in society.
This is why it’s illegal to do cocaine at work if you’re a poor person flipping burgers, but not if you’re an investment banker.
it's a nice bit of propaganda that they're there for us, but I urge anyone with that idea to seek out and research the history and origins of the modern police.
hint : in the US they first emerged as 'slave patrols', and then later modernized into 'industrial labor controls', and things weren't all that much better across the ocean in London with Sir Robert Peel and his version of the 'police service'.
> in the US they first emerged as 'slave patrols'
> Sir Robert Peel and his version of the 'police service'
I assume that prior to the "modern" police, policing was still necessary, since there were lawbreakers and troublemakers since time immemorial. What do you regard as the substantive difference between the pre-modern police force and the modern? Did the former somehow serve "all of us" better than the latter?
That led to extremely selective enforcement at the best of times.
The idea of a professional, independent force that served the public and preferred formal laws was the innovation.
Previously you’d need to either deal with it yourself, or track down a local patron and hope they cared enough to assign some muscle to deal with it on your behalf - and didn’t favor the perp more. Think ‘Godfather’. In those cases, written law was rarely a priority either.
> Police to give out free air tag tracking devices to combat rise in stolen vehicles
https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/police-to-give-out-f...
Crime Alert
THEFT OF BICYCLE
AT THIS NEIGHBOURHOOD
ON 20 MARCH 2013 @ 7 AM
Witnesses, please call Tanglin Police Division
(phone number redacted)
i hope that isn't true. A buyer of stolen goods needs to accept that a consequence of it is that they could lose possession of said good. This is why for expensive goods, you should ensure you're not buying stolen goods.
It is logical that it works that way. Proving something is owned by someone else can be quite hard for certain items.
I know it’s false in the UK and I’d imagine it is false in any country where the law is based on UK law.
Failing to retrieve it at the time is going to mean losing it forever. If you find a crackhead with your phone and wait for someone else to retrieve it, that phone is long gone.
If you buy something that was stolen, the original owner has the right to get it back without compensation to you.
In reality things are not so stiff. My dads bag was stolen from the train. The thief was apprehended on the station. He got his bag back from the cops because it had identifiable information in it. Perhaps a bit light on evidence that the thief was not the owner, but it's not always overly complicated. I think the thief got the right nudge.
A fun thought experiment is that in the time you might have left your car parked in the street, it might be stolen, sold bona fide, then (by happenstance) parked in the same area, so one day you just go back to it and drive it away.
I guess in a more practical sense, you could claim that's (more or less) what happened after recovering your possessions after having them stolen... what would happen in that edge case?
Does not change anything. I mean poor guy, became a victim of a fraudster, but what does my bike have to do with it?
>you cannot repurpose the product yourself
This is not repurposing, this is its prevention.
>solutions of real world capitalist conundrums
There is no conundrums, it is pure tyranny.
More broadly I think it does make a certain sort of sense that a theft should be resolved by the police. Find your item and want it back? Get the police involved. It's just that these days we're all so used the police being completely ineffectual that taking matters into your own hands is the only "sensible" solution.
So stealing your own thing back without the police involved may technically be illegal, but practically if the airtag tells you where your stolen bike is and you have the keys, skip the police and take it. Nothing will happen. The thief or their client is not going to call the police since that gets them arrested or fined.
Of course you can't go into the thief's house to retrieve your things. Then you do need to call the police first. But the one case I know about someone doing that for a stolen iPhone based on Find My app location, the police showed up quickly and arrested the thief + found lots of other stolen things in their possession.