My bike was stolen (2017)
schollz.comA 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have an unusual folding bike. It's a Bike Friday Tikit, and basically has a Steal Me sign attached to it. But it also can be folded extremely rapidly and covered with a custom built-in cover so it looks like, oh, a tuba case.
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.
I really like that the guards recognized that the rule was stupid, and sneakily gave you a workaround. It's just a shame that inflexible, arbitrary rules end up existing in the first place, and that (presumably) the guard would have gotten in trouble if they'd let you in directly.
Rules is rules!
I had the same bike stolen twice and was able to find it on Facebook marketplace both times. The key is to file a police report and make sure you have the serial number of the bike. Without these, the police will not help. Once you find your bike, message the person, negotiate, set-up a meet up, and then get the police involved.
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.
Convenient how the police just skipped right over how receiving stolen property is a crime.
It's not so easy -- you have to prove that they know (or should have known) it was stolen, which isn't easy.
People like to blame the cops for everything, but the prosecutors are where the current breakdown in law and order is happening.
It was a different person selling the bike both times. I think the police got their info, but if they didn't have a history of stealing, they let them go. If they are caught again, I hope the police charge them.
How does FB marketplace avoid liability for this sort of thing? As far as I can tell, a meaningful amount of stolen stuff is traded there.
where i am they let small things slide, for a while, then they switch from intell mode to enforcement, and do a crime suppression sweep, that goes right up to the persons that "govern" that economy.
So the police didn't do any detective work, didn't help with the sting operation, and they didn't punish the thief. It seems like it'd be more fruitful to get a few of your friends and solve the problem yourself. It's not like the thief is going to go to the cops.
> It's not like the thief is going to go to the cops.
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.
One of the hallmarks of a justice system is the presence of a neutral judge and a defense attorney.
Mob violence is most certainly not just.
I agree with you. The legal system's job is to substitute for vigilantes. In this case the legal system doesn't provide certain services adequately, so the incentives favor vigilantism.
Also the presence of an executive part of the government which enforces law. If that is missing, the justice system is broken just the same. I don't understand why often we find it unfair when mob justice is administered (and it is unfair) but we don't find unfair that the police refuses to administer justice.
The police already foreclosed any access to your justice via budget priority. Now we're discussing various flavours of injustice.
Vigilantism isn't ideal, but what else is a person to do when law enforcement refuses to do its job? Not sure "just let it go" is a great answer to that.
In that case the US didn't have a justice system until 1963, as that's when people gained a right to a public defender: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_v._Wainwright
Although since the states rarely fund it adequately, you often basically don't have one.
What, if you take the GP's comment as true, is very troublesome. But you didn't invalidate the GP in any way.
Had same story, except at the meet up, the cops arrested the bike thief. It might have helped that the cop recognized both the thief and thief’s “back up” muscle guy hanging out ~30’ away, ordering him by name to walk away as he approached.
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
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-fn0yCdqHg
Apparently you might get lucky.
Last year I had a very similar story, though in my case the police were not only helpful, at first they encouraged me to make first contact and initiate the sting! This was primarily due to them being short staffed the night I found my bike listed online, but I was pretty sure the police were going to advise that I stay clear of the thief, which is what most of my clear-headed friends said.
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.
I wish bike manufacturers would start including GPS devices into the frames of high-end bikes. The devices would need some access to insert SIMs and charge them and then it should act as a deterrent.
This is such a good idea that a number of high-end bike manufacturers agree with you and do so. VanMoof is one example, but they are not the only ones.
I believe VanMoof mainly makes e-bikes - I was thinking more of high end carbon fibre road bikes from companies such as Specialized, Giant, Pinarello etc.
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).
My Van Moof bike has this, they even offer an additional service where they go and get the bike back for you
Does this service involve very large men all wearing black and ear pieces?
There was a post a while back from someone who did this for Van Moof. The majority of the time a simple "that bike was stolen, can you give it back" works just fine.
I think the only problem I see with this is that most competent bike thieves are going to know what bikes include gps and how to remove/disable it (or to strip it for parts and ditch the frame)
Cyclists can get incredibly OCD about weight, they will buy bolts from more expensive material to save tiny amounts of weight. Peron anally I always found this a bit strange as things like cutting your hair would likely save more weight.
Something like an airtag would probably work.
Airtags and similar can work, but there are downsides. For one, AirTags specifically have a series of anti-stalker features. That means a thief knows the bike is being tracked. Second, any tracker you hide on the bike can be found by a thief and removed.
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 think it would be hard to hide an airtag effectively on a metal-framed bike. Putting it in the frame would interfere with wireless communication and any other location would be easily discovered.
That's correct [1], but there are plenty of accessories to hide one pretty well still.
My bike was stolen this year when I visited Utrecht, in the Netherlands. It wasn't even my bike: it was my sister's folding Birdy. They retail for over €2000 these days, but I assumed that thieves would be put off by the fifteen years of scratches and dents on it. Also by the €135 German lock.
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.
Glad this had a happy ending. I'm still torn up about my own bike, stolen in broad daylight. It was my fault - it wasn't locked up.
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.
> it squeaked when you bore down on it
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.
That is great, I'm glad they honored the warranty so well for you. Mine was really old - an early aluminum frame, it wasn't welded but bonded together - but now I wonder what they would have done if I had asked.
Yeah, I had my bike stolen when I was at university. It was my only form of transportation (other than legging it) too.
(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.
> It was my fault - it wasn't locked up.
Pretty sure it's still the thief's fault. (I dunno, maybe you were in Amsterdam at the time.)
Yeah, it might not be smart to leave a bike or car unlocked, but it is till the thief's fault it got stolen.
Isn't there an unwritten rule in Amsterdam and some other cities, where there are tons of crappy old bikes around and you can just take one and leave it elsewhere? In Innsbruck that was the case.
Yes, that's what I was referring to with that parenthetical. I understand that to be an aspect of the culture in that city. Really, country, but obviously I specified the city in my comment.
It's kinda interesting because you can have a theft occur from the perspective of a naive visitor but otherwise innocent behavior from the perspective of the "thief".
> It was my fault - it wasn't locked up.
You don't live in a high trust society. However, diversity is our strength.
Originally I thought this is another story of using AirTag or some tracker to get the bike back. But surprisingly, this is a unexpected story. I fell bad about the officer discourages people from conducting their own investigations, but also feel heart-warming when distributed a entire police force for author's case.
Police helped me very much when I had two bicycles stolen. They were actually my roommate's but he was pessimistic of getting them back, so I called the police myself.
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.
I like the writing style. Compact sentences. Reminds me of Erlend Loe's first few books.
I have been experimenting these past few years with an even more condensed style of writing which I have termed "Iceberg Articles".
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".
Same here. I must be jaded because every time I click to read a story like this, I am fully expecting:
"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!"
You must frequent the same recipe sites I do.
I find it quite the opposite, it seems pretentious. It seems to use stops where commas would usually be, making it less obvious where content is more related to the previous piece of content.
I know of someone who, during the pandemic, noticed a certain homeless encampment that regularly had $8K bikes lying around. Because a homeless person would certainly possess a six-month-old carbon World Cup race bike.
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.
Is this in Austin by any chance?
What a sad human being they must be.
Found the bike thief!
I was waiting for the story to end with “the police impounded my bike for evidence, so I still don’t have my bike.” Nice that it actually worked out for him.
A prison stint for bike theft seems a bit intense. Yes, it's very annoying to have a bike taken but there must be a better sentence than prison time.
For one bike maybe, but what about 10 or 100? Or if you run a chop shop focused in stolen bikes? There are a lot of enablers out there, but it is all seen as petty enough to fly under the punishment radar (at least here in Seattle).
It sounds like they cared more about the drugs found in this case.
1990: oh darn it not again! Find the nearest junkie and give them fl25
2022: call the insurance company to explain the €3000 van Moof is on it's way to Romania
I was just wondering, wether airtags or similar technology would be helpful in this kind of situation
There are special devices like BikeFinder[0] as well. Where I live it give you a reduced price on insurance. Worth it if you have an expensive e-bike for commuting etc that you often have to park outside. It has some more features than an airtag: It can phone home itself without being near a phone, can alert you the moment the bike is moved etc.
Airtags could be detected if the thief has an iPhone and gets a warning that they're being tracked.
There are GPS collars for dogs that would seem more directly related to solving the problem. I spoke to a guy the other night with one and he said it cost 6 euros a month, which is going to add up. Fine for a dog, where you expect to loose him / her to an extent, whereas I assume you wouldn't expect to loose a bike.
This should be tagged 2017.
Added. Thanks!
(Edit: if anyone wants to volunteer to add correct years to titles, please email hn@ycombinator.com)