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.
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.
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.
It's not just bicycles.
If you're really lucky you might get a call back someday on a car.
Isn't it the same government that made vigilantism illegal?
My anti-theft strategy is: my bike has never had a lock. This forces me to fold and cover it and take it in with me wherever I go. Office buildings, federal buildings in DC (really), offices in the Smithsonian, labs. Restaurants nearly universally allow me to bring it in and tuck it somewhere because as long as it's covered no customer is going to complain; they don't even notice it. It's like a Jedi mind cloak. This was the case for Rome as well, when I had the bike there for about a year.
The only place I ever had an issue was the National Science Foundation. I biked to a panel meeting only to discover they wouldn't let me take the bike in. There was a bike cage in the basement but for "employees only". And the guard station wouldn't let me tuck the bike there out of liability concern. However it turns out that the panel meeting was on a second floor room which coincidentally was attached via a sky bridge to a shopping mall across the street with no guard station. The guards hinted that I take the bike to the mall, up the escalator, across the bridge, and right into the room. Which I did.
Although we caught the guys selling the stolen bikes red-handed, the police couldn’t do anything. The guys just claimed they bought it from someone else and were trying to flip it for higher.
People like to blame the cops for everything, but the prosecutors are where the current breakdown in law and order is happening.
That's a rather bold statement. A friend was sexually assaulted in a public bathroom, punched the person who did it, and then my friend had assault charges filed on him by that person. My friend was able to plea to non-criminal charges, but it certainly wasn't a pleasant experience.
Mob violence is most certainly not just.
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.
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.
It’s easy to over generalize.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cologne-poli...
Apparently you might get lucky.
Due to a storm I stalled a little, and it was enough that the police went and did the sting without me. They called me to come get it where it went down, and there was a whole team there looking very proud. They said less than 1% of cases bikes get recovered because nobody registers their bikes, and not many people call them. There’s a whole warehouse full of unclaimed bikes.
The thief was a serial offender, but also homeless which I feel bad about. He had to go to court and I got several letters requesting I share my story of the financial damage the theft caused me, but since I got the bike back there wasn’t any to speak of.
Maybe it's a weight-weenie thing as e-bikes are already heavy so adding 100g isn't noticeable (not that I'd be able to notice 100g on an acoustic bike).
Having it integrated by the manufacturer means both avoiding Apple's measures and making it much harder to find and remove. So it's generally a preferable option when possible.
I locked it up next to a bike path, with lots of other bikes. I made sure to fold the handlebar down so it couldn't possibly interfere with passing cyclists. I met my Dutch friend and had wonderful pedalo journey around the city. Utrecht is great, you should visit.
When I got back it was gone. There was a young woman nearby, in tears. Her bike was also gone. My memory's not what it used to be: had I, in fact, left it somewhere else? But I then found what remained of my lock: a cleanly sliced 5cm long section.
It wasn't insured but I thought I'd report it to the police anyway. Always good to have up-to-date crime statistics! And it's unusual enough in terms of model and colour that maybe I'd get it back one day. The police were polite and spoke excellent English. However, a tourist reporting a stolen bike apparently required assistance from a second, and then a third, member of staff. It took over twenty-five minutes of wrangling with computers and ring binders to establish that I needed to have an in-person interview to report the theft. No, none of the three staff were able to do that now. I'd have to book one. When was the next available interview slot? Not until next week, after my departure from the city.
Later that night I was morosely googling "bike crime utrecht". Cheering myself up with bit of confirmation bias. Despite not reading Dutch I was able to figure out from the local government's website that there is a depot to which the authorities remove illegally-parked bikes. Not only that, it has a web interface where you can search for your bike. I do wonder why the police didn't mention this possibility during our lengthy encounter.
My bike was, of course, there. I sheepishly collected it, paying the nominal fee, and failing to dispute the "evidence" that they provide in their computer system (a photo of a sign prohibiting bike parking. I went back to the scene of the crime later; the sign was nowhere near, and was even on the other side of the road).
Moral of the story: use one of the many free municipal bike parks when you're in the Netherlands.
It was an old bonded aluminum frame Trek, it squeaked when you bore down on it but it was upgraded and tweaked just the way I like it. I haven't felt the same about cycling since.
My old trek commuter just started doing that. Then I inspected the frame and found some cracks around where the cabling comes out. Went to buy a new bike and the shop said, well at least go check if they’ll warranty it. So I did, my local shop just happened to have the 15 year old original receipt archived. They sent photos to Trek, and Trek warrantied a replacement. And it was a full bike replacement, even though I stripped the old bike. I felt very sheepish about taking a new bike after the very well used bike frame failed (maybe abused? I was touring on it, a lot, not just commuting). I told the shop I felt like I was cheating, and they said “take the bike and don’t even worry, Trek makes it easy and they like doing it for loyalty. Plus, other people have brought back 30 year old bikes, so you’re not even on the list of crazy stories.” Wow. I definitely feel some loyalty to both Trek and this shop after this… I won’t hesitate to buy another Trek from them once I need one.
(I didn't even try the police. A lot of bikes got stolen there, and they were not going to spend their time on this sort of crime.)
It wasn't particularly great, just an off-brand mountain bike, but I loved it. I had a more intimate relationship with it than I've had with any car I've ever driven. There's just something about getting a bike set up exactly the way you like it, where it fits you and your style of riding just perfectly.
Pretty sure it's still the thief's fault. (I dunno, maybe you were in Amsterdam at the time.)
You don't live in a high trust society. However, diversity is our strength.
I had no receipts, just a description, half of one of the bikes in an old photo, and the combination of the lock on one of them. The bikes were stolen unlocked, leaning on the outside of the house.
The small-ish-city policeman seemed to have an idea who to suspect, and found one bike at a pawn shop and the other in the trunk of a car. Used the lock combo to confirm the one, and I forget how we confirmed the other, other than the description and that it was in the possession of the same thieves. Arrested two people and got the bikes back to us a month or two later, with very little work on my part.
Here is the iceberg article on the topic of Iceberg Articles:
https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html
I think you'll get the idea, but here is another example which is a work in progress:
https://john.kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip.html
... and yes, I am aware that the opposite of the "tip" of an iceberg is a "bummock" but I decided to just use "body".
"Someone stole my bike. Here's how I got it back.
It was an unexpectedly warm day in the hills of Colorado, back in October of 1967. My father--or, rather the person who would eventually become my father, because he didn't yet know it--relaxed on the porch after finally getting to those weeds his mother had been pestering him to work on. My soon-to-be-mother, or at least the soon-to-be-bride to my father as they'd not met as of yet, rode her bicycle along a well-worn trail just outside the woods of rural Vermont.
Did you know that rural Vermont is where Bernie Sanders was born? Except that's not true because he was actually born in New York City some twenty five years earlier. Twenty-five, incidentally, being the age at which someone is eligible to serve in the United States Congress.
[sixteen paragraphs from the Australian parliament to Kevin Bacon later]
So, anyway, I was able to buy my bike back from the thief on Craigslist. I even negotiated the price down a whole $100!"
The person went to the camp regularly for a while, with a baseball bat, and retrieved bikes. They had 5 in the garage at one point. Doing so was more hassle, though, once they were in possession, than just letting people with such bikes file insurance claims and what-not.
2022: call the insurance company to explain the €3000 van Moof is on it's way to Romania
(Edit: if anyone wants to volunteer to add correct years to titles, please email hn@ycombinator.com)
