
What happens to your bike after it’s stolen - bootload
http://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-profiles/articles/this-is-what-happens-to-your-bike-after-its-stolen-october-2014
======
ScottBurson
Somewhere in the last year or so I read an article arguing that the reason
bike theft is so attractive is that although the reward (to the thief) of the
crime is small, the risk is practically zero. The suggestion was that if the
police managed to successfully investigate and prosecute even a small fraction
of bike thefts, they could increase the risk to the thief by several orders of
magnitude. Since the reward is so small, this could effectively deter at least
casual theft.

There would probably still be professionals stealing expensive bikes, I
suppose, but still, this seems worth trying.

~~~
Paul_S
What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more
than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
$1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy
to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better
security, but it often means more demand to steal it).

At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and
sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a
bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually
quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for
first-time offenders.

What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in
Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with
the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them
plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible
for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people
who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once
in their life, and usually not something elaborate.

Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3
operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into
the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some
garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort
with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and
sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit
than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory.

If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs
that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a
few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you
prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's
not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of
escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let
this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and
an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals
living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from
the truth.

------
aaronharnly
I'm reminded of this delicious line by a San Francisco bike guru:

"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and
bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another."

(From this lengthy and fascinating first-hand account of a reporter's attempt
to recover his stolen bicycle)

[http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-
bicycle?pag...](http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-
bicycle?page=0,1)

~~~
bootload
This is a great read. Nothing seems to have changed much since 2007.

------
mcfunley
> Any bike thief worth his shim knows you’ve got to liquidate the rolling
> booty via parts

When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks
trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less
sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their
faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article.

It was also an open secret that local restaurants bought stolen bikes for
delivery workers and just covered them up in duct tape. I'm sure this doesn't
explain 100% of bike thefts.

Maybe in Seattle chop shops are necessary, but in New York the problem seems
so overwhelming that that just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary effort. The
police generally could not care less.

~~~
Symbiote
My bike was stolen in London in 2009, the day before I went on holiday.

I found it on Gumtree (like Craigslist) the next day. I stuck the phone number
in Google, and a load of other Gumtree adverts popped up -- "Call Dave" "Call
Pete" "Call Andy". I sent this to the police. An officer phoned a few days
later, and was really pleased and surprised at what I'd been able to do. She
said she'd pass it on to the "intelligence team".

Nothing seems to have changed since then:
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182)
(I picked one advert at random.)

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Heh, similar experience here. In fact I'm part of a facebook group for 2nd
hand stuff, one dude always posts bikes for sale there, like 2-3 a week, but
from like 50 different accounts. (hey it takes 1 minute and the bike sells for
~$100) Problem? He makes the pictures in his garden with a very particular
fence I always recognize.

I wasn't quite sure if he was just a repair guy with a small business, someone
buying cheap broken bikes and fixing them up, using FB as a sales channel, or
a proper thief. Until one day I saw someone comment on one of his bikes on
facebook saying he went to buy a bike and that the guy had an elaborate camera
and a television screen to see if the police rang the bell or just a regular
buyer as well as some other negative comments.

Police didn't seem to pick up the case though, he's still at it. But yeah I
always put the phone number in google, if I get a load of different names I
just move on. It doesn't happen that often, but when something is too good to
be true it happens like 9/10 times.

------
jacquesm
My uncle observed this in his thesis: 'the combined weight of lock and bicycle
is a constant'.

------
chvid
In Copenhagen, Denmark where bike riding and bike theft is very common, the
police does little about it. In fact it came out recently that the police have
an unofficial policy of not investigating thefts of value less than 13.000
euros due to "lack of resources".

There is seldom story of say an angry man in a van running down two kids on a
stolen scooter otherwise vigilante justice is very rare.

I think for most bike thiefs are just having field day (year or decade) and
probably quite a bit more organized than in Seattle due to massive market for
bikes and bike parts here in Copenhagen.

~~~
mrweasel
I don't think that stole danish bikes are sold in Denmark, not whole nor in
parts. They are loaded on to truck and moved out of the country.

I believe that most Danes buy their bikes part in stores (physical or online),
making the market for stolen part very small.

I understand that the police doesn't have resources to investigate every
single bike theft, but perhaps if they looked at on a case by case basis and
looked at the problem as a whole, then maybe the economy would be vastly
different. If 100 bikes are stolen, they aren't being stolen by a 100
different people, more likely just a few people are responsible for the
majority of those thefts. I worked at a company where the entire bike rack was
stole at once, a truck backed up and the entire row of 30+ bikes was stolen.
Because of how the system works the police will get 30 different cases of
stole bike, each of which isn't worth looking into.

It's a bit different from the US, because Denmark is much much small, but if
the Danish police said "The next 3 to 5 years we invest heavily in finding
bikes and preventing bike theft" then you wouldn't need to do much after that,
because the criminal would have moved to a different country.

------
erispoe
I wonder to what extend the intensity of bike theft will incentivize bike
users to buy and use bikes of low value. I have conflicting anecdotal
experiences about this. I lived in Rotterdam, where bike theft is intense, but
where people usually ride cheap bikes every day, and where you know you can
buy a cheap bike to someone in the street, for a price as low a ten euros.
Bikes are a cheap commodity in Rotterdam. In San Francisco, also a bike theft
intensive city, people seem to be undeterred in riding expensive bikes, and
the expected price is in the hundreds of dollars.

The difference might be that bikes sleep outside much more often in Rotterdam
than in San Francisco.

edit: typos

~~~
jacalata
Are lower income people in SF riding expensive bikes, or just the well-paid
ones? If bike-riding is a rich person's thing in SF, then the average rider
will have spare cash to throw at it, stores can focus on selling more
expensive bikes, higher prices are normalised...etc.

~~~
aceperry
It's mostly younger people ride bikes, but because of the availability of bike
lanes and public bike racks, more and more people from all incomes are riding
bikes.

------
zht
So what is the solution to bikes getting stolen? It seems like we cannot
really make locks that are cheap enough to manufacture to prevent thieves from
stealing bikes/harvesting them for parts.

Do we put GPS trackers on all bikes? Can we enforce harsher punishment for
bike thieves?

~~~
schrodinger
I think bait bikes are a good solution. Put out a few normal looking bikes
with gps trackers in them, and have stiff fines for those who get caught.
Making locks safe against an angle grinder isnt really feasible, but making
someone think twice before even trying because it's a bait bike might work.

~~~
name_censored_
Only three problems with that:

Firstly, bait bikes are inevitably going to be cheap bikes. Thieves are more
interested in expensive bikes - and if the expensive bikes are not only more
profitable, but also safer to steal, then they're bound to step up their lock-
picking and angle-grinding game.

Secondly, finding someone to organise this would be difficult. Any single
organisation sufficiently large enough to do this would be bureaucratic enough
to insist on the same make/model of bike (for the obvious homogeneity
benefits), which would make them as obvious as an undercover Crown Vic.
Conversely, any kind of grassroots or community effort would (by design) need
to alert as many people as possible to the venture, including the bike thieves
themselves - thus spoiling it before it even begins.

Finally, these things are chop-shopped almost the instant they get on-sold.
Tearing a bike down can be done in a public park in 5 minutes flat with a
pocket's worth of tools. The bike thieves can adapt a lot more easily than the
sting operators.

~~~
DanBC
You make a couple of assumtions that are just weird.

There's no reason to assume tha bait bikes are going to be cheap bikes, nor
that all bait bikes would be the same make and model.

~~~
name_censored_
Bait bikes of a make/model make sense _in a sufficiently bureaucratic
organisation_ because it makes purchasing, tooling and technician training a
hell of lot easier. Police cars (Crown Victorias) are obvious for the benefit
of a few chases/crashes, when police fleets could have been a bit more
surreptitious. I don't see a large organisations doing any different in
selecting a "perfect bike to steal".

I assumed cheap bikes because of Ainmats[1] ratio of 1 in 100 bikes being trap
bikes. 1 in 100 in any reasonably-sized city means tens/hundreds of thousands
of dollars of kit (including GPS), and anyone with that kind of scratch has
_someone_ trying to minimise expenditure. Or, why spring for a Trek Butterfly
to catch a hungry junkie when a Huffy would net hundreds of the same?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818498)

------
dreamdu5t
This article is incorrect. Kryptonite U-Locks cannot be picked with a bic pen.
That hasn't been the case since 2005. That was only a certain model, and once
made public they fixed it and offered free replacements.

~~~
thrownaway2424
"Certain model" means literally every Kryptonite U-lock, except for the New
York series, made prior to 2005.

------
peterwwillis
I follow two principles to avoid bike theft: 1. always lock both wheels and
the frame up with a very thick U lock, and 2. ride a bike less expensive to
replace than repair. I regularly find bikes at Goodwill, flea markets, etc
that are not stolen but are dirt cheap ($50, $100, etc). Even found a banged
up old bike (dead tires, bad derailleur/gears) laying in a gutter. May not be
the best ride in the world but it gets you from point A to B and never gets
stolen.

As for preventing theft in general, don't leave it locked up outside. That'd
probably cut down on 90% of thefts. They could improve outside safety by
building special wire mesh enclosures for bikes on bike racks, which would
make it more difficult to steal, more obvious someone is stealing, and
generally protect the bike from vandalism and the weather.

~~~
collyw
> don't leave it locked up outside. If I stopped locking my bike outside, I
> would likely never use it in the city.

------
bootload
_"... Fortunately for Rosa, the Darlings were also allegedly fencing
electronics, allowing the owner of a stolen iPad to track his missing tablet
to the same apartment via an iPhone app connected to his iPad’s GPS. ..."_

Would be a nice hack to build something like this. How would you embed a
device like this into into a frame & other parts?

Comments: _"... Ryan Scheel: Might it make sense to put a GPS device in bikes
encrypted with a private key that only your computer has access to? ..."_

RFID inventory of parts unique to a bike?

Would be interesting if each (high value) part had a unique serial number
unique to the bike. Small RFID devices for the frame, wheels, seat brakes
registered to a unique frame? That way each part could be tied to a frame &
identifiable to one bike.

~~~
jzwinck
If you are serious, the answer is to make the device a 1" tube that fits into
the steer tube of most bicycles and can receive and transmit RF via the top
cap (which would be plastic rather than the usual metal). Easy to conceal,
near-universal fit (for bikes from the last 10+ years), sufficient space for a
battery, radio, no visible parts. Charge using the tube as ground and the top
cap bolt as hot.

The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you
can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this).

~~~
chromakode
I thought this sounded familiar, so I did some searching... here's pretty much
exactly that:

[http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp](http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp)

~~~
jzwinck
Wow, thanks for digging that up. It even costs $152 right now (converted from
GBP). Apart from the fact that you seemingly have to remove it to charge,
looks good.

------
Barnabas
If you have a nice bike, take a moment to register it:
[https://bikeindex.org/](https://bikeindex.org/)

~~~
bike_index
Thanks for recommending the Bike Index! We recommend registering even if you
have a cheap bike, since it's easy and free.

Here's another article about what to do if your bike is stolen -
[https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-
bike...](https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-bike-has-
been-stolen-in-the-bay-area-e08e6b6f005b)

------
bambax
> _You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily_

> _The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and
> brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars
> each on the black market_

If the whole bike sells for $20, how can each component sell for "hundreds of
dollars each"???

> _her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared_

I didn't know bikes that expensive even existed.

So maybe the parts that sell for "hundreds of dollars" come from $8k bikes,
and bikes that sell for 20 bucks are the cheap ones; but the article isn't
clear on this.

It seems that owners of $8k bikes should refrain from buying parts on the
black market, and that they can afford the small overhead (but added security)
of only buying from legitimate dealerships?

\- - -

Regarding the problem of bikes steal, is it better or worse to have a system
of public bikes that can be rented for cheap? Paris (and London, and many
other cities) have a system of public bikes that are available everywhere and
that are very cheap to rent; I know those bikes get stolen (or broken)
sometimes but they cannot really be resold as you can't legitimately "own"
one.

It would be interesting to compare the numbers of bike thefts for cities that
have public bikes versus ones that don't.

~~~
neotek
The difference is between a junkie quickly selling a bike to get a fix as fast
as possible, and splitting the bike into components and knowing the right
people to buy them.

The junkie doesn't give a shit about tearing the bike down and getting the
best price, he just wants to shoot up and will take whatever he can get.

------
peter_l_downs
Priceonomics wrote another interesting article on the subject:

[http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-
happens-t...](http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-
stolen-bicycles)

------
jmspring
An interesting local stat for Santa Cruz. According to the article, given
Seattle has a population of about 650k, they are dealing with one bike stolen
per 580 residents. During the last year, the reported bike thefts in Santa
Cruz city was 404 and with a population of 65k, we are looking at one theft
per 160 residents.

Wherever there is a drug trade and a high transient/drug user population,
there will be issues with bike theft. Where I live it is _bad_

------
Animats
Tracking devices in about 1 in 100 bikes would put a dent in the problem.
Hidden deep inside the frame, you'd find the chop shops.

------
WalterBright
Back when I rode a bike to work, I parked it next to my desk.

------
easyname
reminds me of this movie
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/)

------
mullingitover
I know the Constituion forbids it, but I think cruel and unusual punishment is
A-OK when it comes to bike thieves.

~~~
ams6110
Horse theft used to be a capital crime. Under the same constiution we have
now.

~~~
undersuit
Horses are like bikes with personalities, I can understand some of the
reasoning.

