But a few things come to mind: (especially for e-bikes)
1. Bike registration. Most e-bikes / high-end bikes cost as much as a beat up car. having them all come with basic registration makes it very hard to sell a stolen bike.
2. Bike tracking. Ebikes should come with airtag-like functionality standard. It is a $10 maximum overhead.
3. Bike alarms. If you have a tracker, it should have an alarm. The bike already has a bell. just put a put servo in there.
4. Last but most importantly - prosecution. Treat ebike theft like car theft. That's $1-10k value of stolen property. No reason to allow it willy-nilly.
Car theft isn't treated very seriously either, I would like to point out. Once your car is stolen, you're pretty much on your own. They'll let you know if it turns up. They won't go looking for it, they won't chase someone in a stolen car for long. The only time it 'turns up' is if it's involved in an incident that doesn't go well, or if it's sold to some unsuspecting buyer who tries to register it and it comes up stolen.
Any area where departments have money they have cars that just run ALPS and cops pull over stuff that pings. Could be expired registration/inspection, could be cars flagged stolen. While they won't actually drive around looking for the car if it goes around enough and has stolen/invalid plates it will get pulled over.
As for chasing cars? Depends on department policies. Out in my region they chase in almost every situation except for cars driving wrong way in divided traffic. Has lead to stuff like cops plowing cruisers into the trees trying to chase a motorcycle rider through windey roads.
I am not saying they do nothing, it's just an difficult problem to police unless you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Plates get swapped, cars get stored or parted out, it's luck if they spot your car on the road. You get put into a database, and you hope your car gets flagged in a situation where it can be recovered.
We actually had a car chase in Helsinki just a couple of days ago when the cops spotted a stolen BMW, tried to stop it and the driver fled. I'm not sure if the part about them not chasing after stolen cars is that accurate. And the fact that cop cars have automatic license plate readers make driving a stolen car that much harder.
What makes you think they prosecute car theft? I had a 100k car stolen. I had a Tile hidden in the car. Car made its way from GA to TN. I called TN police and let them know where the car was. They found it and put their own tracker on it as well as a camera recording the car. A guy came and took the car and made it to West Memphis, AR before he got stopped. They arrested him for theft by receiving over 25k and altering vin number, both felonies. The guy bailed out in under 24 hours, 6 months later when his plea date came up it ended with “state refuses to prosecute” and all charges were dropped.
>1. Bike registration. Most e-bikes / high-end bikes cost as much as a beat up car. having them all come with basic registration makes it very hard to sell a stolen bike.
This is how it works in Hawaii, and they are very strict about it. All bikes get a frame sticker with VIN number, and it's illegal to posess one without it. Kind of annoying but it helps immensly.
VanMoof has one to three. They contact the police but often don't get results.
Anyways, in Amsterdam mosr VanMoof's I see are still attached to something with a chain lock. I think tracking your bike is too much of a hassle. Also it is probably needed for insurance reasons.
I’ve had a VM for three years and my tracking expires any day now. Never had to use it, thankfully, and I also lock the bike with a short Almax chain which is as tough a deterrent as is practical.
Tracking a vehicle is great. My wife’s scooter has a tracker and my motorbike doesn’t. I was scooter-jacked a few years ago by a couple of scallys and the police found the scooter 90 minutes later in a car park where they’d dumped it - to check if it was being tracked.
My motorbike was then stolen from outside my house. Super annoying but then it turned up - randomly and spookily - literally outside my old house where the thieves had dumped it in case there was a tracker on it.
So trackers work - whether they’re installed on not.
Phones already have a lot of these protections, costing over felony theft amounts these days, registered by the manufacturer and cell phone provider, tracked via cell tower, yet they are routinely stolen. Criminals are smart. They know how to take out a sim card and throw it in the trash then how to part out the phone on ebay. They will know before long how to make whatever security is present on an ebike irrelevant enough to make some money.
Doesn't Japan have mandatory bike registration by frame engraved serial number?
I am not sure to what extent this is what prevents bike theft in Japan vs the general law abiding nature of people in Japanese society as it relates to not stealing anything
2. Tracking and surveillance in e-bikes is the last thing I want.
3. So you get an alarm that the frame of your hike showed up in a remote warehouse, 80 miles from city. Police won't bother and you'll be wise to not go there by yourself.
4. More funding to police, in other words? Theft won't investigate itself.
Not just more funding, but prosecutors and DAs and judges who want to crack down on bike theft. If your bike is in somebody's house and you have a tracker showing it is, you should be able to get a search warrant. Police should be empowered and willing to help you get it.
> What's effective enforcement for bike theft look like in your mind?
addition mine.
Effective enforcement is consistent enforcement, even a 'minor' fine or weekend in jail is a sufficiently large stick but no stick is big enough if you don't actually hit anyone with it. What's the current clearance rate for bike theft? 1 per 10,000, if that? You could have a whole bike thieving career and never see the inside of a squad car let alone jail cell.
This was where my head was going as well, how many people are actually caught? Barely any of the actual thieves I bet. I imagine the sales rings get busted sometimes.
That video of casey neistat's where he steals a bike in front of a crowd, the three officers there had been NYC officers for 10 years and had never seen a bike thief amongst them.
I haven't given this careful deliberations, so I wouldn't stand by this yet, just eyeballing it:
Two months in prison, preferrably with penal labor. Repeat offences leading to longer sentences, including several years expulsion from major population centers. Let's see how their bike stealing goes over in a small town.
While I think escalating punishments for repeat offenders is appropriate, the key to stopping anti-social behavior is not severe sentences. It's consistency in catching/punishing these acts:
Yep I am in agreeance with your last paragraph, that is where my curiosities were. How do you effectively catch bike thieves? I think it's infeasable to catch them in the act, it's just too easy for thieves to be discreet and out of the way. But maybe there are ways to catch them after the fact.
Is that a difficult question, or is there some trick portion of it that we'll fall under if we answer?
Just give the bike back, pay any damages, if it's gone, then pay the value of the bike, some jail time, community service, any/all of the above. This is not a hard problem: people are behaving like children, taking what is not theirs and breaking social agreements/boundaries. So treat them like children and do the adult equivalent of "get a spanking and say sorry, so you know not to do it again.".
No trick, I was genuinely curious. I am surpised the answers are all punitive though. In my mind the issue is that it's simply hard to police in the first place. I think people are over-estimating the power of punishments as a deterrent. The logic is sound, but it relies on criminals being forward minded critical thinkers aware of the penalties, and that you caught them at all.
Admittedly I have no data for my area to back these thoughts up, but punishments are only important if people are actually getting caught, and they are only a deterrent to those who care. People still steal cars all the time and that is grand theft.
I agree that the power of punishment as a deterrent is unclear, but your car example does not hold up, since there are a lot more bikes stolen than cars.
Official reported thefts from the Netherlands [1](Note that the number of bike thefts is probably far higher than the official number):
Every bike I've ever owned was stolen in the end - the only exception being my current bike, and that's a matter of time. That's across four cities on two continents. Bike theft seems universal.
Presumably, if you buy a second hand bike, it was almost certainly stolen. How to get no one to buy a second hand bike though?
I ride the bike regularily for the past 25 years with 15 of those in cities. I never had a bike stolen up to now.
Maybe I am just lucky, but at least once a year one of my peers had theirs stolen. The things I did different:
- get the best lock you can get
- your goal is not to make your bike impossible to steal, just to make it mor attractive to go for the bike next to it
- bike should look like shit while being in excellent technical shape (e.g. my frame is a old slightly rusty KTM racing bike frame, but with Shimano Ultegra)
- never put the bike into an dark corner, where it is the only bike to steal and thieves can do so unobserved, instead try to put in the spot where a thieve might expect someone to observe them. Nobody ever took a bike dirctly in front of a store exit if it looks like you might return any second now.
- don't leave your bike anywhere outside for more than a night if you can't avoid it
None of that is bad advice, but thieves have also moved on from whole bikes due to the value of higher end parts - they are even less trackable than whole bikes, they are commodity parts with only a few manufacturers, they are not worth tracking in their own right and they are much easier to ship. It's not unusual to hear of forks being cut to get fancy wheels or chainstays being cut to get drivetrain components. I imagine cutting frames to get expensive batteries may be next.
My anecdata is that I've only had one bike stolen and it was the cheapest, worst one I've ever owned (parents bought on 2for1 offer). It was protected with a good lock which was cut through and surrounded by dozens of nicer ones in a secluded bike garage, some of which had incredibly basic and weak combination locks. These days I just insure my bike and use two big locks (leaving them in situ at places like work).
I've also seen a drunk courier (after work) fall off their bike and while they were getting up someone picked up their bike, hopped on and cycled off very slowly in front of dozens of people. 2 police on foot were also there and stalled, pretended to listen to lots of accounts, to kill time and avoid a chase or indeed any action at all. But that's another story.
I mean it is ultimately a stochastic thing we are fighting against. There is no guarantuee to not getting your bicycle stolen, but we can change the odds of that happening into our favour by how we do it.
> It was protected with a good lock which was cut through and surrounded by dozens of nicer ones in a secluded bike garage, some of which had incredibly basic and weak combination locks.
This is an odd one. Maybe the bike had specific parts the thieves were after? Shitty bikes are often targeted by drunkards who just try to get home (they steal it for transportation, not for money). But they would get stopped by a good lock (provided it is actually locked).
A pattern you see with these bikes is that people mostly don't bother to mess with them after they learn about the counter measures. Basically, there are several levels of protection. 1) if it is locked, it will make some noise when people mess with it. 2) When they don't stop, it will make a lot of noise. And it escalates quickly to ear piercing levels. There is no way you can pick this up and just walk way with it unnoticed unless you can unlock the bike or dismantle it without setting off the alarm. A light touch will do that. 3) if by any chance you do succeed in stealing it while not drawing the attention of the entire neighborhood, it has a tracker. 4) if you manage to disable all of that, you basically have a product that is relatively hard to sell because world + dog knows they might have to hand it over in the likely case that they are caught by the bike hunters. Because so few thefts escalate to that, VanMoof can afford to spare no expenses on trying to track thieves down and keeping victims pacified with a replacement bike. It's a simple insurance that works and actually lowers their risk.
It's not impossible to steal one of course but it adds up to a lot of trouble and risk for not a lot of payoff. Most bike thieves would prioritize easier, less risky, and more valuable targets.
I use Swapfiets, which is a Dutch bike leasing startup. I just pay a monthly fee and don't worry about theft, repairs, etc. There are many thousands of them across Berlin; hundreds of thousands across many European cities. Nobody ever messes with these bikes. They are so recognizable that there's no point in stealing one. No bike hunters required for this. It has no tracker or alarm. I've had one for two years in Berlin and nobody ever messes with it. And it's a decent bike too. I park it wherever I want including some places where I would never park any bike I own like the train station, rough neighborhoods, etc. It's great. I can go anywhere I like in the city, leave the bike on the street for a few hours and it will still be there when I come back. I do this every day. They have electrical ones too. They are very popular with delivery services.
Does not invalidate the point. Most people stealing stuff would want to minimize their exposure. In this case, the dude is on camera even. Not a good thing if you get caught. We're talking drug addicts looking for some quick money here. So, are they going to touch a bike that that they know will make a lot of noise and alert every cop in a mile radius? Of course they won't. They'll walk away from that every time.
Some of them occasionally will try anyway and that's where the bike hunters come in. We're not talking Sherlock Holmes here. This is simply about chasing down idiots that steal bikes and the scum that buys the bikes knowing full well what they are buying. Easiest job ever, these are not criminal master minds.
Best way to get away with some crime is to act all casual about it. Wear a warning west, you can even got one printed with some official town logo the people will recognize.
Might work on Germany but on Brazil those that tried this model faced issues with stolen and vandalized bikes. People were stealing bike components that on principle weren't compatible with no other bike.
Swapfiets builds their own bikes and does not - never ever - sell them. If one gets stolen, it can‘t be resold without one noticing it’s stolen, as these are not in circulation in the first place and still owned by the company that built them
If I can show the key for the lock, it will cost me 60 euros to get a replacement. If somebody destroys the bike, I simply get a replacement. I pay 19 euros / month. The bike I have probably has payed for itself by now,
Had a VanMoof. The 'bike hunters' was worthless. The "GPS" is actually A-GPS which uses cell towers to triangulate the bike to within .5 miles...not too useful.
When or if you do find the bike on a facebook marketplace listing, the Cops and VanMoof do nothing. As they can't attempt to purchase the bike, and can only be engaged if they see the stolen bike's serial number in the public space.
The benefit was the insurance, where they simply replace the bike with a deductible of ~$100
If the police are actually as bad as portrayed here, it seems like VanMoof is actually offering 4 for the price of 1 plus 300 dollars, plus the cost of insurance.
Just have an accomplice keep the stolen bike in an enclosed area where there is no GPS access. Disable the AGPS for bonus points (apparently that is possible)
It's only fraud if you have a functional legal system for the item in question; I think some comments made demonstrate that there is a distinct group of people who unironically feel that is not the case.
That's crap insurance honestly. For another dollar a month or so on my renters insurance my $800 bike is ensured without a deductible. I could be robbed at gunpoint for my phone, bike, laptop, and everything but the fees to replace my stolen id cards will be insured.
Based on some of these videos it looks like they also have some radio direction finding or proximity tracker in addition to the GPS. GPS gets them into a circular area then they have to run around to pinpoint it.
I have a VanMoof bike with both a GPS and a Find My tracker.
The first time it got stolen in Berkeley, I recovered it. It hadn't gone far, so the police were able to locate it and the thief.
The second time it got stolen, I couldn't recover it. But I had already bought the Peace of Mind coverage plan, so VanMoof replaced it — and lent me a bike of the same model in the 2 weeks it took to deliver.
Are you able to keep using the Peace of Mind coverage plan once replaced? Or did you have to buy a 2nd plan? Asking out of genuine interest. It seems to be some of the value of the plan is that you get to worry less about the stress/fear of your bike being stolen -- but if you are off the plan once it has been stolen once...seems like a loss of value.
> We’ll recover or replace up to three times within your three-year coverage. If by some freakish bad luck your bike is stolen a fourth time, we won’t be able to recover or replace your bike, but we will provide you with full tracking information so you can hunt it yourself.
This alongside with Citizen’s gig security signals the decline of local government police forces. I would argue that the prevalence of Ring is signaling the same thing.
> ... signals the decline of the local government police forces.
I don't think it's something you can lay at the feet of the SF Police Department. I asked Pete McLaughlin, SFPD (retired), why the police don't go after bike thieves more aggressively.
"Our hands are tied," he said. "They [the thieves] know the most we can do is give them a citation, and they'll be out that afternoon."
California has a history of being lenient with non-violent crime, which is appropriate in some cases, but maybe not in others. Maybe leniency is the wrong approach for some of these bike thieves.
But it's complicated. I heard Jerry Brown (former California Governor) talk about how ~10% of the state budget goes to prisons, and he's not comfortable with such a large amount, and I agree--throwing people in jail is expensive!
Lastly, when the SFPD was needed, they move fast: I had a home invasion a couple of years ago (a guy kicking in my window, trying to break in), and five police were in my apartment within minutes of the 911 call. Worth 20 stolen bikes IMHO.
Another issue is the police can only ever tackle the very leading edge of the problem due to the scope of their jurisdiction. Realistically the trafficking of stolen bikes, bike parts, cars, car parts, etc, takes place over city lines, county lines, state lines, probably also national lines. Good luck ever making a dent on organized crime if a key piece of that operation takes place within a jurisdiction staffed in the low dozens (quite often the case in fact with cartel drug labs and illegal grow operations in rural California). You really need the FBI, but their hands are full just indicting local government officials in my city for corruption, let alone going after the bike thieves.
That being said there is a lot to be done at that leading edge, especially when its not uncommon to see someone with a dozen bikes in varying states of disrepare piled amongst the detritus outside their dwelling. It seems like that should be considered probable cause to me and worthy of more investigation vs just letting that continue unhindered. There is some line between the cops I was familiar with in the midwest (who would search your vehicle and throw everything on the side of the road on the grounds of smelling of pot if they just didn't like the look of you), and the ones here in california who are more concerned with catching snorelaxes (1) than enforcing the law.
Was there a glorious past when bike thefts were taken seriously?
Or is there also an element of a widening gap between rich and poor here, where the rich will be further insulated from the impact of failing public services?
Never. It's even odd when burglaries were taken seriously. I don't know the mythical past that reactionaries reminisce about, although my age says that I lived through it. The past I remember had years old stacks of unprocessed rape kits.
Rape kits go unprocessed for many reasons. The accused confesses, for example, or dies. Or the victim's story/claims are directly contradicted by hard evidence, like cell phone/financial records or numerous witnesses placing the accused somewhere else. Many victims recant their stories, for varied reasons, many of them unfortunate - but that still make the case non-prosecutable.
It's not just a matter of funding; there's only so much lab capacity.
Rape is a tiny fraction of violent crime - barely a few percent - and spending millions processing rape kits unnecessarily is virtue signaling that does nothing to reduce the bulk of violent crime. The only reason it's getting so much attention is because it benefits a politically privileged class.
There was certainly a past where there were fewer open addicts on the streets. To be fair drug addicts have been around in cities for hundreds of years, but they've always been cracked down upon and generally not in any great numbers. Versus today, where I kid you not I see kids who can't be older than 16 smoking meth about twice a week in the train station on my way to work. Of course there is a crisis of bike theft in this country. There is also a crisis of catalytic converter theft and theft of just about anything carryable with scrap value, because all of this theft is going on to afford the crisis of drug addiction we continue to evidently just pretend does not exist in this country versus face head on with public treatment programs and institutionalization.
However, there is a stolen bike store near where I live, everyone knows they sell bikes they’ve stolen, they’ve been busted selling stolen bikes multiple times, and they’re still in business today.
Perhaps this has always been true, but it feels as if we’ve completely given up against low level crime.
Police are generally pretty bad at theft cases, but there's also a prevailing idea of social justice in many areas that prevent the police from accomplishing anything. It's not the police that decriminilized petty theft in San Francisco, that's the politicians and people who voted for them.
The prevalence of Amazon Ring is in large part because local police subsidize them and give them for "free" to underinformed citizens, and then access their private data without their consent pretty much at will.
When I read articles about this sort of thing, I wonder if the reporters and readers are aware that when there is a (violent) crime in public, (at least in my area of the US) it is ordinary practice to go around to private businesses with nearby security cameras and request footage.
I'm not minimizing the issue of consent, I just wonder if outraged people (especially HN types) are aware of how things are normally, and either way, are/would be outraged about voluntary cooperation.
Is it generally considered ok to put up cameras and voluntarily help the police out of a desire to protect the community?
Just because the camera owners consent doesn't mean the people caught on tape consented.
Just because someone is angry about one thing doesn't tell you if they have a problem with something related, but slightly different. Which is why I was asking.
The police are there to protect the rich and oppress the plebians. Any crime that the police prevent or resolve for the general public is only an aftereffect of protecting the privileged.
It has always been thus throughout history.
This is why the vast majority of police need to be disarmed.
Police forces were literally created to protect capital, and then back ported to supporting local communities. The parent poster is correct, police exist primarily to protect the interests of capital - that's literally their history.
Police in the US exist to protect themselves. They don't care if you're rich or the embodiment of capital or not. They won't do things that would put themselves at risk, and they won't get fired for not doing their jobs.
Saying "thing A was originally B therefore A is secretly B now" doesn't seem to usually be true.
I don't know man being the kind of sheltered person complaining that the police doesn't drop everything for your meme e-bike sounds rich enough for me.
I take it you've never spent time with rich people.
They are always on two kicks: self-improvement or making more money. If they have "free time" they are travelling and reading books, not spending time with not-rich people, except perhaps as a safari to understand them better.
Interesting article for me, from a couple angles. I had a bike stolen about a week ago and dang, it sucks. Cool there is a customer facing tool to help with retrieval! It’s always weird when thinking about “encountering” the person selling a stolen bike, kind of scary to think of potential outcomes. Does this service provide any “tools” for that? [edit: article says asking for it back is usually sufficient but I’m still skeptical]
On a separate note I went to middle/high school with Ryan Eastman - seem to remember he kind of disappeared from school because of pursuing professional cycling. Remember looking up his race times at one point and have always been kind of curious what became of him. Sorry to hear about his crash from this article(!) but also very glad he found something cycling related to work in.
Good luck to all involved.
Edit: because this is HN I was initially thinking VanMoof also had a service one could attach to any bike. Seems it’s proprietary offering for their bikes. Original text left unedited above
> article says asking for it back is usually sufficient but I’m still skeptical
Personnal and friends experience tends to agree with the article advice. The intensity of the ask vary from "It's my bike" to "It's my bike and we don't want to call the cops about it, right?". Most of the time, they may try to sell it back to you though.
a few weeks ago, i came out of a neighborhood cafe to find my bike gone. on a hunch, i walked over to a nearby homeless encampment and saw my bike sitting there. i walked up to it, grabbed it, said "that's my bike", cursed the dudes out, and rode off. it felt a little crazy at the time, but it worked. the thief(s) didn't seem too fazed by it.
Correct, because much of the US is sparsely populated, and homeless folks will aggregate where public services are available and accessible. You won’t find a homeless encampment in the middle of Nebraska where there’s nothing around but ranches.
It’s not “progressiveness” that attracts homeless encampments, it’s density.
Where there are people, there are resources. It’s got nothing to do with politics.
The politics provide the resources though. Compare Portland, Seattle, NY, SF, or LA to any city in Texas or Florida. Even correcting for population, its a fairly significant difference.
Non-political resources like a density of restaurants with food available, density of people who will provide help, charities, food banks, community centers, etc.
If you look at each state’s share of the total number of people in the US experiencing homelessness, is unsurprising that the states with most are also home to the latest cities. Texas is low per capita, at a state level, but when you look at rates within cities then Texas and Florida and Arizona cities start to pop up.
It’s not like conservative local governments have “solved” homelessness.
As long as there is homelessness, dense urban areas will always have the largest share of people experiencing homelessness because there are simply more resources, in the general sense, there. Where there are people, there are resources.
Let’s not forget climate as well. California, and the West coast, have a pretty favorable climate in general.
los angeles. i believe we have the highest homeless population in the country with the second largest gdp (over $1T for the greater metro area). our mayor and city council build 16 homeless housing units in a year and slap each other on the back for jobs well done all around.
Ya I’ve heard of the thief trying to sell it back to people too, it reminds me of a Larry David skit or something.
I as well have no anecdotal evidence of any misfortune being caused by someone retrieving a stolen bike (other than not getting the bike back).
Certainly if you have the legitimacy of a gps tracker or serial number the retrieval rate would seem higher. But literally tracking down or scheming to meet a thief over text via Craigslist conjures bad vibes for me personally.
The article doesn't pursue what happens if the alternative is encountered, but I'm curious what VanMoof's SOP is if the person in possession of the bike threatens violence or displays a weapon.
That's an escalation that only the most desperate would make, and they would probably play stickup at the ATM before doing all the work to steal bikes. A fancy bike is not worth the risk of serious prison time that comes with strongarm robbery. Regular theft is like 90 or 180 days in jail at most, and probably way less.
After having two bikes stolen at once, I bought Tile trackers for a bunch of my possessions and hid one on my new bike. The tracking in Seattle is good in places with a lot of people around, pretty coarse in other areas, but I'm hoping that it will at least give me a direction to head in if this bike is ever stolen. I'm wondering whether anyone has a recommendation for a bike GPS tracker though. The ones I see generally look too obvious, have expensive subscriptions, need charging every day, etc.
There are covers for the Apple AirTags that look like regular seatpost-mounted reflectors. I haven't looked to see if they exist for other trackers, but that's the route I would go.
Don't the anti-stalking features of AirTags make them poorly suited to anti-theft uses? If I were a professional bike thief I'd have an iphone just to get notified when I've stolen a bike with an airtag on it
The AirTag will beep if it's been separated from its owner for long enough, so presumably the thief would be able to find it relatively quickly once that happens.
Its only real use, I think, is to find something that's been lost. They report their presence to all iPhones - including that of a thief. They do that to protect against use by stalkers.
Its still useful for its original purpose - especially if your phone has the UWB stuff so you can play the "warmer, warmer" game. Just one less trick up its sleeve.
You can mutilate the tag to disable the speaker. It won't disable the alert on others' phones (including the thief), but it may be a blessing more than a curse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32159861
I bought two Boomerang bike trackers a while back as well as upgraded to their 4G version the "V2". Unfortunately they aren't great at stuff like arming, disarming, etc... You can arm/disarm using bluetooth using Bluefruit, but the app can only do so through the 4G network it attaches to which can be iffy sometimes. The battery is okay, but not amazing, I have to charge it pretty often.
The things are pretty obvious and are intentionally so. They have an audible alarm that goes off if they sense movement and send a notification to your phone if they can connect to 4G (Iffy). I guess some Canadian city tried to run a bait bike program using them but no one would touch the bikes with an alarm. Personally I prefer to deter than to have to hunt down the thieves and retrieve.
By far the best way to prevent theft is to register your bicycle and encourage others to do so as well. I use Project 529: https://project529.com/garage
Police tend to not enforce bicycle theft, mostly because proving ownership is not usually possible due to lack of VIN numbers and registration. Having proof of ownership like photos, Project 529 stickers, and such is a great way to help police stop bike theft.
FWIW LAPD told me to use Bike Index after mine was stolen. So if that’s the system they are cross-referencing with then that’s the one I’m going to use.
Either is fine to be honest, when you report the bike stolen you can provide the data from either site to prove ownership so if they see it they can get a conviction and maybe even return the bike.
I’m very pleased with my Boomerang - I haven’t tested the alarm function out of consideration for my neighbors but it’s got the battery life I found lacking in smaller trackers. I hope the next iteration has wireless charging or a more robust waterproof port cover.
From experience tracking down a different GPS module and stolen bike: If you tell the kids who answer the door your bike was lost and there’s a reward for whoever found it, things go more smoothly than getting the cops involved.
Bikes are incredibly personal. Even if someone writes you a check for 100% of the supposed cash value, it takes an incredible amount of effort to replace, customize, and fine tune a new bike. And losing one is a major emotional hit, to be honest.
Maybe for the adventure cyclist. The urban cyclist has long been about the $100 duct tape seat disposable bike, knowing theft is not a matter of if but when.
I recently bought an ebike that doesn't include GPS tracking. I was thinking of hiding an Apple AirTag under the seat, but then I read this:
"AirTag is designed to discourage unwanted tracking. If someone else’s AirTag finds its way into your stuff, your iPhone will notice it’s traveling with you and send you an alert. After a while, if you still haven’t found it, the AirTag will start playing a sound to let you know it’s there.
Of course, if you happen to be with a friend who has an AirTag, or on a train with a whole bunch of people with AirTag, don’t worry. These alerts are triggered only when an AirTag is separated from its owner."
So in an effort to prevent stalkers from tagging victims, the AirTag beeps to give away the fact that it's tracking something "separated from its owner." This makes it useless for my use case because if my bike is stolen, it will be "separated from its owner."
I saw a project a while back where someone hacked up a fake AirTag (or perhaps flashed hacked firmware onto a real one?) that switched it's private key out in a deterministic pseudo-random way, so the stalker tracking sees it as a different AirTag every 6 or so hours and never triggers the alerts, but the owner still could query the FindMy service to see the locations for all the pseudo-random keys...
AFAIK, the AirTags will only alert the thief once they bring the bike back to their "home" location. I definitely have an AirTag hidden in my bike since it's only like 25€ for additional peace of mind.
It won't disable the alert on the thief's phone (if they use an iPhone or an Android with the tracker app), however it doesn't really need to as the alert could actually be beneficial in convincing the thief to simply abandon the bike then take time to find & disable the tracker all while they are being tracked and the owner (or ideally the police - though in practice they are useless) can show up at any moment. Even better if they get the alert once they've already brought it home as they're definitely better off moving the bike away from there rather than having the trail stop at their place.
Sf police don’t give a shit about stolen bikes. I saw a homeless guy pick up a bike (wheel locked to frame) prop it on a shopping cart and run away. Called the cops. They didn’t give a shit, belittled me and refused to come. You’ll note in the article that it’s impossible to get the police to show up even when there’s known stolen property inside and clear gps evidence.
sfpd doesn’t do anything about anything. Check out that great video of the cops rolling up on a burglary in progress. Perp comes out the door, gets in car and drives off. Cops do nothing.
When vigilantism is the only justice available you’re living in a failed state.
Not just SF, and not just bikes. My experience is that cops don't give a shit about any theft unless it happens right in front of them. No amount of evidence you can hand them will convince them to spend so much as a minute investigating.
SF police don't care period. It's a corrupt organization that simply exists to steal funds from the state. It needs to be burnt to the ground and re-created.
It sounds like a very similar situation to Seattle. While living there, it was remarkable to me how useless and/or hostile the police felt compared to the police in other cities. I've been threatened multiple times while going home late at night and it was never the police that actually helped. I'm convinced we really need to get better at helping each other as a community rather than relying primarily on the police.
A workplace of someone I know is constantly getting burglarized. They even found the guy selling their stolen stuff on Facebook. Kent PD, of course, won't lift a finger about it.
Yet, somehow, they manage to soak up half the city's budget, and also secure a million-and-a-half dollar settlement for a police sergeant who was fired over having a nazi poster in his office.
KPD doesn't even need to pretend that defund movements are to blame for their incompetence - because as far as I can tell, the mayor's full-time job is covering their ass.
[1] For people who don't live here, Kent isn't some liberal hippy paradise.
Ha, sounds like you know me and my business. Yeah, happens all the time. We have cameras and even know who did it. Doesn't matter. Cops don't do anything.
Giving it less funding won't make it better, nor would it magically make something else appear. You'd need more funding to have a program like "actually firing them if they don't do their jobs".
I think it extends well beyond SF. There’s a guy on my local Nexdoor whose car was stolen in Oakland; after waiting for more than 6 hours to file a report, he was told by an officer that they prefer to avoid reports as they have to do paperwork each time one is filed.
(As a counter anecdote, I’m further out in the East Bay, and when I caught a guy taking my bike from my garage, the cops stayed on the phone with me as I chased him down and actually arrested the guy when they caught up with us. I was surprised.)
Remember this when people say Chesa Boudin was the cause of the spike in crime.
In reality, police departments went on effective strike, enforcing only the policies they wanted to, and leaving many cases open so as to provide statistics for bad faith actors to smear the reputation of the DA who has no actual control over the police.
This disturbed local populations, but those people were quick to blame "criminals" because there seems to be an infinite fount of good faith assumptions reserved for police, even in the face of so much evidence of how bad they are at their jobs (willingly or otherwise).
Chesa definitely made it much much worse since it was plain policy. Hundreds of small business places got robbed, not just by established thugs, but by opportunists. Why wouldn't they, when the city declares they won't prosecute robberies <$600?
The statistics don't bear that out. You were convinced by a PR campaign that publicized crime and associated Boudin with it, not an actual rise in crime.
There was an actual rise in crime, both perceived and statistical, immediately after he was elected. Hell, Boudin ran on a campaign that people like his terrorist parents should not be prosecuted.
It's a well documented fact that Boudin refused to prosecute pretty much anything besides police officers. Why would police officers arrest anybody in that case?
It's the same story with other Soros-funded prosecutors: Gascon in LA, Kim Foxx in Chicago. To give them credit, they don't hide that their own goal is to protect criminals. People should listen.
Ah, I see, you prefer to believe the narrative presented by police press releases and ads on the sides of buses, rather than actua(ria)l statistics.
A note about the recall campaign: the funding for both sides would have been roughly equal except for one PAC -- NEIGHBORS FOR A BETTER SAN FRANCISCO ADVOCACY.[1] That PAC ultimately took in 84 donations for a total of roughly $5.8MM, meaning average donation size was roughly $70k. If each donation was given by one person (reasonable estimate) and each person lives in SF (provably false) then that represents around 0.01% of the population of SF. Not exactly the groundswell of support it was portrayed to be.
An article in The Nation[2] goes into detail about the context around Boudin's time in office and the hysteria of commercial real estate interests who, rather than working to mitigate the problem that generates such fears, stokes the fears instead.
> When vigilantism is the only justice available you’re living in a failed state.
What you're observing isn't a 'failed state'. The apparatus of the state is working quite fine, and the state is completely capable of enforcing its will on its subjects. [1]
What you're observing is the police doing their job[2] (Which is protecting the state), and not the job you want them to do (protecting you and yours.)
[1] The definition of a failed state is one that is incapable of enforcing its will on its subjects. Which is what you see in, say, 2021 Afghanistan, where the central government is only theoretically in charge, with Taliban rebels actually being able to enforce their will on the country. There's a categorical difference between 'can't' and 'can't be arsed to' - and you're observing the latter.
[2] Why doing that job entitles them to half of your municipal taxes is an exercise for the reader.
Don't know why you are downvoted, you're 100% correct. Police do not exist to help individuals, they exist to maintain the state monopoly on violence and to protect capital.
If individuals get any benefit from this it's either accidental or police trying to protect their image.
We had 4 bikes stolen from our shed in Vancouver and the police were helpful.
We called the non emergency number and an officer followed up quickly via email, sent a case number for insurance claims and one of the bikes was returned a few days later on a Sunday evening from a chop shop bust.
Then you've been living in a failed state all of your life. The cops would only have ever gone out for that call in a sleepy wealthy suburb, and even then only if the cops personally knew the person who called in.
The VanMoof youtube channel releases a ~monthly video of the hunters in action. Sure it's marketing, but is an interesting watch. There's a few videos from SF, and one where they track a bike from Europe to Northern Africa.
This article focuses on thievery at the expense of vandalism.
I leave my bike locked up outside overnight in San Francisco [0], and with three sturdy locks I'm not worried about thieves, but the vandals are another story. Ten days ago I came outside to discover they had set my bike seat on fire, which also ruined the rear tire and tube, along with some cosmetic damage. Total cost to repair: $283. My bike is vandalized typically every 90 days or so.
Those looks like set-ups? Are they actual thieves trying to steal bikes? Wouldn't a thief notice the tether? I can see trying to pretend you're just getting on YOUR bike and taking off...
Anyway, there is a difference in an insured bike recovery system that has the right incentives and SFPD which does not have the benefit of GPS tracking and profit incentive. Of course their success rate will be dire in comparison.
it's certainly very lucky that the thief always went directly towards the guy hiding behind a tree with a pie. Helpful also that they stayed in the sightline of the camera, even though several of them did have to look directly at it to be sure.
One other thing that would point to those being staged is the injury liability they could incur (the endos) --of course they would have to know who tethered the bikes like that. But the person running after the "thief" would be a good candidate.
> The Standard accompanied VanMoof employees Adrien Yeung and Bret Carmody on a “hunt” in early July, about 40 minutes into which the two happened to see someone riding one of the company’s bikes. The two-person team did a quick U-turn and pulled aside the person to find that the bike’s GPS system was disabled, indicating that it had been stolen.
> The man riding the bike gave it back without a fuss, claiming that he had bought it at a local street market.
What were some of the characteristics of that man that led Yeung and Carmody to guess that he was riding a stolen bike and not one he owned?
If you live in a city like Seattle, Vancouver or San Francisco and get around the urban core a lot as a pedestrian, you quickly learn to recognize what a crack, meth, heroin addict looks like. Is this a serious question?
I think the worst part of attempting to transition away from driving to biking has been the fact that I can't really trust having my bike parked somewhere.
If I drive a car somewhere, park it in a parking space and lock the doors, I have very high confidence that my car will be there when I get back. Probably won't get vandalised or damaged either. I could even leave something in the car and it probably won't be smashed and grabbed as long as it's not in plain sight.
If I ride my bike somewhere, lock the frame to a bike stand with a sturdy U-lock and leave it there for an extended period of time, I don't feel confident that it will be there, or that it won't be somehow fiddled with. Even if they don't get the whole bike, they might run off with the tyres, or the battery if they manage to dislodge that.
I could easily ride my bike to the nearest commuter train station, park it there and continue my way downtown. Would be a lot faster than taking the bus there. However, if I'm gone for a couple of hours, I don't feel safe parking the bike at the station. I wouldn't feel this way with a car. Same comes to parking at home. I feel absolutely nothing about parking my car outside my apartment, but I'm not confident in having the bike parked outside for more than 10 minutes.
And I feel like this way even though I've never had my bike stolen and I don't live anywhere particularly dodgy. Just having people around me having had their bikes stolen make me feel this way.
As a happy longtime Brompton owner, I really like being able to dodge the whole theft problem with bicycle parking by just folding the bike up and using it as a shopping cart or unobtrusive bit of wheeled luggage. I don't even own a bicycle lock.
Reducing bike theft significantly is pretty easy actually:
1) Bike registry
2) Visual plaque stating bike is registered
These two things make a bike less attractive to steal, and give the city the tools to actually prosecute stolen property cases and reunite owners with their goods. Nothing is perfect but this is a gain for bike riders.
It's interesting that the VanMoof bikes are visually distinctive, meaning that the bike hunting team only has to look for one kind of bike. And the bikes have a radio collar of some sort. A general purpose bike hunting service, or the police, would have a much harder time with the huge variety of bikes out there, most lacking the electronic beacon.
Just buying a bike here in the U.K. on a cycle-to-work scheme. Are there things I can do or buy that are better than a fairly sturdy lock, not leaving it unattended in stupid places, or perhaps gaffer tapping an airtag somewhere not too obvious? Also not too sure which insurance is good value.
I would fight to have your employer let you bring your bike inside. You will become overly familiar with freight elevators, but when your bike is sitting next to your desk all day, it's not going to get stolen.
This is the way to go if you have the option. If you need to keep the bike outside but have a reliable designated area, you may want to consider leaving a heavy chain and padlock on site. If you don't have to carry it with you, you can invest in extra robustness.
If you're talking about trips in addition to the commute to the office, the considerations really depend on the location. The sturdier the lock the better, but in many cases, a superior lock out of view could be considered worse security than a lesser lock with more eyes on.
You'd be well-advised to secure, in addition to the frame, components like wheels and seat, especially if they're quick release. For that, a lighter cable (maybe even one with a built-in combo lock) might suffice as deterrent, but again, it depends. Some of our opportunistic friends seem to be more interested in wheels than frames.
Our office is not great for cycling, but we’re only on the first floor so I’ll probably just lug the thing up the stairs. Just excitedly waiting for cyclescheme to process the payment now!
One minor meta-recommendation on the sturdy-lock front is to look for content from the "Lock Picking Lawyer" and find out if there are any bike locks that he recommends. He tends to make short work of most locks but there are some that gain his grudging recommendation; the number of severe vulnerabilities in many "high security" locks is eye opening. Edit0: added "front" after sturdy-lock.
Are locks ever actually picked? I have only ever seen brute force approaches.
If you have the inclination, a proper, heavy chain is better than a D-lock - both should be impervious to bolt-cutters, but a D-lock can be forced open/broken with a jack and a chain usually cannot. Also a chain is more difficult to cut with an angle grinder as it moves about and might break the cutting disk.
Yep spot-on, I'll add: From a weight perspective, a well-sized D-lock used correctly should not have enough space to permit an attack with a jack, so don't get one that's too big. Also, one mistake chain-users might make is allowing enough slack that a link is close to the ground, which can be used as leverage with a bolt cutter, etc.
Downside to chain is weight; a robust chain is about 2x the weight of the equivalently robust d-lock; if you are allowed to leave the chain at work, it's definitely worth it though.
He tends to not just pick locks, despite the name. If there is a vulnerability due to shoddy construction, he seems to use that to break through the lock as far as I have seen.
I was able to cover my bike on my renters insurance. Zero deductible. All told its like $15/month for the peace of mind covering all my valuables, not just my bike.
Pretty aggressive framing given that bikes generally havent had gps trackers builtin before. Police wouldnt have any experience trying to get such things back, yet, given the new-ness, but these people have both time & some experience.
It's not uncommon to hear about people losing something like a smartphone to a thief, know where it is due to GPS tracking, and police just won't do anything with that information.
Well, it's not the only issue. Without GPS tracking or bike registries bike theft is legitimately a very hard problem for police to deal with, so they're used to relying entirely on getting cyclists to use better locks.
The situation has changed though, and they certainly deserve criticism for failing to change their attitude.
Police definitely have done bike stings in SF, and so definitely have the know-how to track at least some bike thieves this way. Example from googling:
I think the point parent commenter was making is that the police do have the knowledge and ability to tackle bike theft. Your comment implies that they are choosing (or being instructed) not to, which is a different thing.
That said, my experience echos yours -- I'm a bike commuter in Seattle and ride by 3 open-air bike chop shops on my way to the office, all literally adjacent to bike paths. Pretty uncomfortable.
The open air bike chop shop phenomenon is bewildering to me. It's like police on the west coast aren't allowed to use probable cause. Don't cops get promotions for busting crimes? So much low hanging fruit exists driving around a west coast city looking for infractions, from the obvious hard drug use and chop shops and street takeovers, but also stuff like the fact that chances are any gas leaf blower operating near an apartment building is probably illegal yet never enforced despite widely done.
I feel like there is a cultural issue going on with west coast law enforcement where its like they don't want to deal with the paperwork or the effort of actually doing their job. It was telling when some LAPD got in trouble recently for playing pokemon go and ignoring dispatch calls to go after a snorelax (1). But just anecdotally I see general terrible work ethic from the cops. I see them abuse signal preemption all the time for nothing. When they are out directing traffic in downtown LA for some random construction road pattern they usually have an airpod in one ear, which I'm positive they aren't allowed to do. You call about a petty crime and the reaction is almost like "Did someone die? No? What do you want me to do then?"
https://www.vanmoof.com/shop/en_nl/bikehunters
their website says they even go flying around the world to places like war torn Ukraine and Casablanca gangs to retrieve the bike. That sounds very dangerous.
If its stolen property, the original owner still has superior title to the person who bought it after it was stolen. Might need to be hashed out in court if the second-hand buyer won't relinquish it, but it's not illegal to ask.
They aren't forcing anyone to surrender the bike. They're just asking them if it's stolen and if they'll give it back. In any case, buying stolen property doesn't entitle you to the property.
There's two possibilities to your question: That the person riding it bought it secondhand from someone who stole it, and that the person buying it bought it from the (first) owner, who then calls in Vanmoof to steal the bike back for them.
1) Receiving stolen property is illegal, and the bike is still property of the original owner and they can take it back anytime. The person riding it is culpable to the extent that they knew it was a shady deal, which can range from "Not at all, but stuck holding the bag of having to sue the thief for fraud for selling them a stolen bike" to "Charged in conspiracy". There's a big range there, but as it's incredibly hard to prove if they were found riding it around, they probably just lose the bike. If they are found with it in a chop shop... that's a different story.
2) Selling someone something with the intent to steal it back is fraud. If you have a receipt from the seller, you can tell VanMoof to fuck off, or surrender the bike to them and sue in small claims court. VanMoof doesn't want to deal with that and will roll over fairly quickly. The (fraudulent) first owner will be very easy to find because they have a contract with VanMoof. They can probably pull this scam once without repercussions, but VanMoof will, presumably, quickly turn over evidence to your police report of the scam to avoid ruining their reputation.
As bikes go electric, it would be good to have them all required to have transponders. We just have to make it a requirement to have them on all the time, then we won't be plagued with this bike theft.
If you have a charged ebike, it ought to be easy to charge your phone.
There are still other problems with that approach. VanMoof currently lets you unlock your phone with your bike, rather than requiring a constant connection, which seems like the right balance.
> The two-person team did a quick U-turn and pulled aside the person to find that the bike’s GPS system was disabled, indicating that it had been stolen
the google bus did a quick U turn and did an illegal terry stop to find that the pixel 6's third party cookies had been disabled, indicated that it had been stolen
Shifter has a great video bike crime - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4
But a few things come to mind: (especially for e-bikes)
1. Bike registration. Most e-bikes / high-end bikes cost as much as a beat up car. having them all come with basic registration makes it very hard to sell a stolen bike.
2. Bike tracking. Ebikes should come with airtag-like functionality standard. It is a $10 maximum overhead.
3. Bike alarms. If you have a tracker, it should have an alarm. The bike already has a bell. just put a put servo in there.
4. Last but most importantly - prosecution. Treat ebike theft like car theft. That's $1-10k value of stolen property. No reason to allow it willy-nilly.