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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

Every college town has at least one theft ring that operates this way. If you see a beat up truck full of bikes on the highway, it's one of these guys moving bikes from where he stole them to where he is selling them.

Finding this activity is as easy as falling off a log. If you want to try this for yourself, you are literally minutes away from meeting a bike thief. He'll have 10-20 bikes on the cheapest locks on a campus bike rack, especially this time of year, or he'll set up a sketchy meeting as in this story.

WTF are cops doing if they are not busting patently obvious theft rings? Making this kind of bust should be utterly basic police work. It should be what the new guy does on his first day. Oh, right, they are raising revenue and fighting the long ago lost Drug War or looking for non-existent "terrorists." This is why policing has utterly disconnected from quality of life and middle class concerns.

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Hah. After I tracked down the seller of my stolen iPhone, I came across an eBay profile that was about as blatant as you can imagine.

Laptops, iPads and all such things, most "without chargers". Phones, most "activation locked".

100+ items.

Told the police. They declined to investigate.

Should have called back and said "Never mind, I shot him."

It would still be easier for them to charge you with lying to a police officer than investigating the stolen goods, and they'll still have a "win in their books."

you joke, but I have been told by police on two separate occasions (one car break in, one apartment break in) that I should have shot the assailant rather than calling the police first.

I imagine it's public perception of the issues as well. If cops aren't stopping bike thieves nobody really cares, but if they fail to stop a statistically improbable terrorist attack in their area then it's far far worse for them. They'll get so much shit and flak for it, especially the higher ups. Jobs will change, so they priorities are shifted not toward what's useful but what the public deems consequential.

Why assume that? May people have been robbed and are angry. many more people have a rational fear of theft and are upset. The people care.

I think it's less general malaise and more that the police don't care that much about cyclists.

Police are there for crowd control first, public image second. Sometimes they can do good work, but that really isn't how they've been set up. At least, that's what the histories I've read say.

I live in a college town, with suspected organized bike theft. The theory is that bikes are trucked to say, Mexico, then sold - they aren't sold locally. That makes it very hard to track down your own bike.

I also remember the classic film The Bicycle Thief, where all the parts of all the stolen bikes are taken off, and liquidated that way.

you don't even have to go as far as mexico, they usually just move to the nearest metro.

That's correct. Steal them in Amherst, sell them in Ithaca. It may also be a "Traveler" practice. They are involved in all kinds of organized theft of middling value items, e.g. shoplifting infant formula, and home repair scams. Anything that can be sold on Craigslist.

I hear this is also true between Seattle <-> Portland.

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