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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with Bike Theft is that it simply isn't prosecuted. They are easy to steal, easy to pawn off and easy to not be held liable for.

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.

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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.

My bet would be that they chased that car not only because it was stolen.

Depends on the local departments discretion and specific situation I suppose.

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.

A VIN number ? For a bicycle ? Or maybe you are talking of motorbikes ?

>Or maybe you are talking of motorbikes ?

Nope. All bicycles have to be registered with the state.

https://hbl.org/resources/how-to-register-your-bicycle/

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

1. Sell parts. It's even more profitable.

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.

>>4. More funding to police, in other words? Theft won't investigate itself.

Yes, and more funding for prosecutors and correctional officers. But it doesn't take much enforcement and prosecution to establish deterrence.

What's enforcement for bike theft look like in your mind?

> 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:

https://youtu.be/p6xVGr9kVFM

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):

Car thefts: 8,670 Bike thefts: 60,010

[1] https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/83651NED/table?sear...

I push a red button (could be a virtual one on a touch screen) and a stolen bicycle explodes somewhere, into thousands of pieces of shrapnel. :)

If it's my bike? Life without parole.

If it's your bike? Sorry for your loss dude!

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

Other tricks:

Paint your bike very uniquely. Eg. Bright pink. Thieves can't be bothered to repaint it, and being so unique makes it hard to sell.

Write your phone number on every part - wheels, frame, seat, etc. Nobody buys a second hand bike covered in phone numbers without ringing the number.

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).

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