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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

This sort of presumes that the cops would care even if they knew exactly where all the stolen bikes were. My experience in San Francisco is they couldn't possibly care less. There was for decades an open-air bicycle chop shop under the highway overpass at what is now the corner of Market and Octavia, which was directly across an alley from a coffee shop and diner popular with SFPD patrols, and no cop ever cared about the bicycles.

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Police indifference seems to be a problem everywhere. Bike theft really discourages people from cycling. If governments want more people to cycle they need to make bike theft prevention a priority. Even a fraction of what is spent on cycling infrastructure would make a difference.

Police are probably paid low enough that they have to schlepp hours into town for their job and as a result they probably enjoy not being required (by some property loss threshold) to help the tech elite. If the constituents (not the governments) want to fix bike prevention they need to pay for a local police force.

I'm not sure how owning a bike qualifies you as "the tech elite"

There's only two kinds of people in San Francisco: there are "Techie Scum" who are people who walk, bicycle, and ride buses to jobs where they work for a paycheck. The other class of people inherited fortunes from railroad barons, 19th-century bonanza wheat magnates, and Mexican land grants, who went to private schools, then Little Ivies, and have never worked a day in their lives. These people for some reason are known as "community organizers" or, weirdly, "tenants-rights activists."

Are there no restaurants in San Fransisco?

In most locations, police salary is public information. According to Transparent California, in 2019 the average salary in San Francisco for a "Police Officer 3" was $171,950.26 and their benefits were worth another $43,036.34 for annual total compensation of $214,986.30.

Police are generally the most well paid social servants anywhere in the US.

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