Ban proposed on SF bicycle 'chop shops' | Hacker News Reader

Ban proposed on SF bicycle 'chop shops'

sfexaminer.com

12 pointsapsec11217 comments

In Japan they have a really logic system where each bike just has a registration number. When you buy a bike they can easily change the owner through some paperwork (there's a lot of paperwork in general in Japan but it's also really efficient). It's really just the same as a motorbike or car, just it's not for ID from far away so they are small stickers instead.

They are chop shops presumably because they chop the bike up into its constituent parts, of which only really the frame will have any sort of marking or serial number.

Yes but in this way, until it is all chop up it's easy to differentiate a stolen bike from a non-stolen bike. If the police just sees a bunch of parts then it's the same as now, but if they see someone chopping a bike they could consult the registration and inmediately check if the bike is stolen or not.

I think one of the most important parts for organized stolen bikes is the frame while other parts are more for small-time things (correct me if I'm wrong).

We have/had something similar in my city. It does nothing to prevent bike theft or getting your stolen bike back.

I'm just assuming here but from what you are saying, your city is an exception, and rest of the country doesn't have that law so I can come to your city from some country side with my bike and lack of registration number on my bike wouldn't be surprise to any one. It would work only if it would be mandatory that every bike in the country have to have registered owner (like cars and motorbikes) so you would never expect buying a bike without registration papers and police could easily check if bike is registered for you or not.

It's a small european country and easy to get the bike out of it. Unless absolutely every country adopts this system, it will remain useless.

Japan also has the advantage of being populated with Japanese, so distinguishing between cause and effect might be difficult.

Seems like a rather indirect (and thus inefficient?) way of solving the problem of bike theft

I think the headline is fair; there's no mention anywhere of "solving the problem of bike theft".

Based on the content, the idea is to give policemen more power (that is, seizing) to handle chop shops which are literally located in the streets.

You could put any longish number on it, then report that number to the police. Electric engraving tools aren't expensive, around $20.

Legislation could mandate a website that handed out numbers to people who registered and provided a way to report those numbers as stolen. Registrants could provide a pic of their bike with the numbers.

This won't eliminate the problem, but it will provide an easy and free method that people could identify their bikes, report them as stolen, and the police can identify which bikes are stolen and return them.

I learned the other day that something similar was happening in the US in the 80s with peoples' social security numbers. Someone was asking why a turntable from the 80s had a big social security number etched into the back; apparently, the initiative was to use it as an identifier in case the item was stolen. Now of course it's rather ludicrous to use your SSN in that way but in principle it seems like a good idea to prove ownership.

Engraving the SSN on things was commonplace before the internet and identity theft became a big thing. Drivers License numbers were used, too.

I don't get it. If everyone (including police) knows that these bikes are stolen, why can't they arrest people that operate such "shops"? Or is property (bike) theft somewhat legal in US? Also, if somebody stole my bike (or anything) I would get really pissed off and knowing where to find these guys (like in this case) I would go get it back myself, possibly with much more dire consequences than police. Doesn't it happen in SF?

Knowing ~ Suspecting != proof.

And there you go.

Because it's really, really hard to actually prove that a stolen bike is stolen. First, it has to be reported stolen, which does not always happen. There also has to be some way of positively identifying the bike, like a serial number, included in the report. Bikes do have serial numbers but not many people record them.

There's a UK-based service supported by the police that helps with this sort of thing: https://www.bikeregister.com/

I haven't had my bike stolen, but friends who have say this helped.

While the proposed legislation appears to make sense, the lack of bike crime statistics makes it hard to judge if squeezing the distribution part of the crime chain makes sense. The basics: how many 'chop shops' are there? How many bikes do they sell? If the numbers are small, it's just another burden on local police which may have other priorities on their plate, e.g. innercity crime/drugs.

One of the countries that tracks bike theft as a separate category is Sweden[0].

  > In 2015, 66,500 bicycle thefts were processed¹. 
  > Investigation was commenced for 6.5 per cent ... while the majority were dismissed with no investigation.

[0] https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...

There are 10 mln people living in Sweden, San Francisco has 1 mln. So there must be like 6K bike thefts annually. How many will be prevented by closing a few chop shops?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com