Steer Clear

At the second annual Steering Clear of Cycle Crime Conference in Birmingham, England earlier this month, the Lancashire Police received the inaugural Quickest Cycle Recovery Award.

The department "not only recovered a stolen bike within an hour" says the award citation, "but also apprehended the bike thieves, all while the bike owner was on holiday..."

Other prizes included the Largest Cycle Recovery Award and the Most Innovative Use of BikeRegister Award.

National cycle database BikeRegister hosted the conference in association with British Transport Police. Officers from 28 police forces attended the one-day event, joined by partners from the cycling, education, and security industries.

"If everybody comes together here," said the Durham Constabulary's Dave Williamson of last year's Steering Clear meeting, "this could be problem-solving policing on an industrial scale."

The theme for the 2016 conference was "Partnership Working," and the day's speakers highlighted the importance of the public, private, and volunteer sectors working together to beat bike crime.

How about sharing best practices internationally?

"Time to Get Educated, Organized, and Inspired"

I wish I were in Portland, Oregon. This is not, to be honest, an uncommon wish for me to have, but at present there's a particular event that has me hankering to be in the City of Roses. Tomorrow night from 6 to 9 p.m. at Velo Cult Bike Shop, Bikeportland.org will host the first ever Portland Bike Theft Summit.

Titled “The Problem, The People, The Solutions,” the event will feature panel discussions of enforcement, parking, and education/technology, bringing together police officers and bike valets, park rangers and transportation planners. The summit is sponsored by Bike Index, and representatives of both that outfit and Project 529 will speak. There will also be time for networking ("and other fun stuff TBD") and a documentary filmmaker on hand to record attendees' tales of bike theft and recovery. The full program is outlined here.

Go to the summit if you can, and, if not, consider whether your city might be able to organize an analogous event. Hmmm.

That Special Place in Hell

Gearing up for ARTCRANK DC on Saturday, I came across this piece by Denver artist Josh Holland while perusing the ARTCRANK Facebook page:

Now I have a "Death to bike thieves" sticker on my bike and considered using that phrase as the title of this blog, so I get where Holland's coming from. Here's how he puts it on the print's page in his online store: "My design is dedicated to anyone who has ever had their bike stolen, and to the special place in hell reserved for bike thieves. Catharsis!" 

Yours for $15.

When It's Okay to Steal Bikes

Got a favorite tool for stealing bikes? Casey Neistat does, and he's not afraid to use it. Sometimes it's okay to steal a bike, he says. When? When it's nobody's bike. Take a listen:

Sign the Petition, People

Seattle Met ran a feature about bike theft in its October issue. "This Is What Happens to Your Bike After It's Stolen" is most interesting for those in or at least familiar with the Emerald City, but click through to see the accompanying artwork if nothing else. Todd McLellan's graphic of a bicycle's multitudinous parts, disconnected from one another but still arranged in roughly the proper configuration, calls to mind the chop shops described in Casey Jaywork's text.

Most striking to me were the piece's revelations about Craigslist:

Whereas eBay and Facebook feature 'back doors' for law enforcement to track suspected thefts, [Stolen Bike Registry founder Bryan] Hance says, Craigslist’s tiny San Francisco staff relies on users to flag illegal or inappropriate posts. But read the fine print: Craigslist’s terms of use stipulate that when it comes to site moderation, the company has 100 percent authority and 0 percent responsibility, making it difficult for aboveboard users to organize against illicit sellers. 'The minute you start pointing out that they’ve got stolen goods, you’ve violated their terms of service and they’ll send you a cease and desist,' Hance says. The terms also nix bots that can comb the site for postings whose descriptions match stolen goods, as part of a larger strategy by the for-profit company to prevent competitors from using its data.

And eBay, too, had suffered in my estimation by article's end. Jaywork tells the story of how a "scrupulously honest bike buff in Maryland" bought on eBay a used frame that turned out to be a $8,300 Mudhoney stolen from Seattle resident Whitney Rosa nine months earlier. The buyer asked for the serial number during the online auction, but, since the seller offered a lame excuse for withholding it, didn't get a chance to check it until the frame arrived. Upon determining that the bike had been reported stolen, the buyer contacted Seattle police, eBay, Whitney Rosa, and other customers (presumably to alert them that they, too, might be in possession of stolen property).

According to the sketchy (and subsequently busted) seller at least, this last part of the buyer's action was in violation of eBay policy. "It has come to our attention that you have broken a serious eBay policy and contacted past buyers regarding transactions they completed with us," wrote the seller. "This is harassment & a serious eBay policy violation… Please stop playing vigilante."

What both eBay and Craigslist should do is require serial numbers on bike listings. Seattle's Project 529 is collecting signatures on a petition to that effect. BTB covered the effort back in June, but it's not too late to learn more and express your support.  

Racks!

Can we all agree that there are not enough bike racks?

Just this past Sunday, I locked my Ogre to a railing outside an otherwise lovely—aside from its lack of bike rack, that is—Indian restaurant in Vienna, VA. With my lunch companion's sick Ridley occupying the opposite railing, the trio of cyclists who arrived after us had to look farther afield for lock-ups. We felt bad, but couldn't exactly fabricate a rack for them on the spot.

So there we all were, fly-parking, both the security of our bikes and the tidiness of suburbia suffering for it.

I only realized what a connoisseur of bike racks I'd become when I got teased for photographing them on a family vacation last week. Then I looked back through my pictures and realized I'd been snapping shots of the things on all my recent travels.

A slideshow of the racks that have caught my eye appears both below and in miniature at right. Got a shot of an out-of-the-ordinary bike rack you'd like to see included? Send it along. The diversity of designs may lead to a future post about which achieve the best mix of aesthetics and security.

XKCD on the Frequency of Bike Theft

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, over my morning bowl of oatmeal, I check out the latest installment of xkcd, a self-proclaimed "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Bike theft may not have cracked the top-four list of most treated topics, but it did make an appearance in yesterday's offering.

Titled "Frequency," the comic features a 10 by 5 grid of words and phrases flashing according to how often the events they describe occur. It's mesmerizing to watch, and interesting if you fancy, say, a visual representation of the relative frequency of earthquakes of magnitudes 1, 2, 3, and 4 or care how the pace of car production in the United States compares to that in China or Germany or Japan.

Now I have no idea how Randall Monroe came up with the numbers he used to create the graphic or, therefore, how much stock to put in them. According to the hover-over explanation, the "comic shows estimated average frequency." For whatever it's worth, Monroe estimated the frequency of bike theft at one bike every 25 seconds.

That's the reading I got, anyway, when I took a break from contemplating cat adoption and bottle recycling and domain registration and sex in North Dakota (!) long enough to put a stopwatch on the time lapse between flashes of "SOMEONE STEALS A BICYCLE"...

"As though the soul of a man had been filmed"

It's fitting that, with Oscar season upon us, I just watched the winner of the 1949 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: Vittoria De Sica's Ladri di biciclette. Variously translated as The Bicycle Thief or Bicycle Thieves, the black-and-white classic opens as Antonio Ricci, a jobless father of two, at last finds work—work that requires him to own a bicycle—only to have his oft-pawned Fides (I gather that this is a made-up brand) stolen his first day out. What unfolds in the film's 93 minutes is a drama that was heaped with superlative praise on the occasion of its re-release in 1972:

It wasn't Miller or Brando or a hankering for a bracing dose of Italian neorealism, though, that prompted me to check out from my local library the Criterion Collection's double-disc presentation of De Sica's masterpiece. I watched Ladri di biciclette after reading that the founder of the Portland-based band Bike Thief named his quintet of folk/alt-rockers after the film—stole its title, if you will. 

I also regarded the movie as a possible answer to a comment made by a mathematician with whom I was corresponding for my day job. I was questioning this fellow via email about a lectureship he once held, and I suppose he decided to investigate—or at least Google—his interrogator. The scholar's eventual (and quite lengthy) reply to my message began:

Reading your blog gives me the illusion of a personal acquaintance—from the intensity with which you are present even when writing about a subject as mundane as bicycle theft.

"Mundane"? "Dull and ordinary"? Bike theft is, sadly, the latter, but it is not the former. This is the stuff of high drama! Since when does dull material an Oscar earn?

I Stole Your Bike to Hit Festivals Soon

Thanks to Marcos for tipping me off to the December DCist post about a new documentary in the works. Southern Maryland brothers Christian, Stephon, and Joshua White shadowed an unnamed but supposedly quite active bike thief around Washington, D.C., filming his actions for a movie they're calling I Stole Your Bike. Check out the trailer:

There may be, as the Washington Area Bicyclist Association's Greg Billing says in the Fox 5 News story about the documentary, "a fine line between glorifying bike theft and using it as an educational tool," but the White brothers, who say their film "will reveal how to 100% secure your bike from future bike thieves," believe they're "going to aid a lot of people in the end."

I Stole Your Bike is slated to be finished this spring.

Don't Supply the Demand: Vet Your Seller

The Schwinn I bought from Michael Birnbaum

Everyone from whom I have ever even almost purchased a bike has been a journalist. There was Olga Khazan, who covers health for The Atlantic, whose email address still auto-completes in my gmail because of the correspondence we had years ago about a bike she was selling on Craigslist. And when in November 2010 I did ultimately buy a Craigslist ride, it was a white Schwinn Washington Post soon-to-be-Berlin-correspondent Michael Birnbaum was selling on behalf of his wife (or girlfriend—I forget which) who had gone to Germany ahead of him.

How do I know these sellers' occupations? Because I Googled them. Even back in 2010, when I'd never had a bike stolen (and had practically forgotten how to ride one), I knew that Craigslist was awash in stolen cycles. So as I perused the bikes-for-sale listings on the Washington, DC Craigslist, I tried to steer clear of stolen property and gauge the likelihood that the various sellers were thieves.

Easier said than done. At the time I assumed that anyone with multiple bikes for sale was a shady character. Now, though, I know that there are enthusiasts who rehab bikes for fun and could, conceivably, have a few ready for purchase at the same time. There are also those who own veritable stables of bikes and who might, to earn a few hundred bucks or free up some storage space (for the latest two-wheeled acquisition(s), perhaps?), look to unload a couple well-used rides at one go.

As a conscientious would-be purchaser of a used bike, you really have to play it by ear, trust your instincts, and, to the extent possible, vet your seller. Let's look at a couple ads, found on the Washington, DC Craigslist on December 19, 2013.

I'm not prepared to say for sure that this Cannondale is stolen, but I'd bet that it has not been well cared for. The ad shows no evidence of either knowledge of or love for the bicycle. The seller provides no details—the bike's size? hello?—and only a picture so blurry you can hardly read the brand name. And that crass appeal to last-minute Christmas consumerism... I'd pass this one by.

Check out the contrast:

This seller has not only lovingly posed the Spearfish, but also furnished a comprehensive rundown of its features. Note also that s/he cites a reason for giving up this "dream" of a ride. (In case the print's too small for you, the ad ends with "Upgrading to a carbon bike.") It's a credible explanation.

This sort of thoroughness and authenticity can be faked, of course, but the Spearfish seller also passed my second test. When I replied to the above ad asking what assurance the seller could give that s/he had acquired the bike legitimately, I got a link to where the seller bought the frame (supposedly, anyway), and this: "Other than that you'll probably have to take my word."

Not as doubt-dispelling as a sales receipt, perhaps, but I like what I didn't detect in the Spearfish seller's reply: offense. Here's how another seller responded when I asked how s/he came to possess the single bike wheel advertised on Craigslist: "I assume you have no intention of apologizing for insinuating that this wheel was stolen." 

Seems to me that a non-criminal would recognize the theft of bikes and bike parts as a problem and be grateful that at least some buyers do their part to avoid supporting it...

How to Foil Creepo

In its circa 1974 short How to Protect Your Bike, Sid Davis Productions relies on a strategy beloved by the authors of my grade school health and home economics textbooks: enumeration. This isn't the "seven dietary guidelines," though—I forget what those were, incidentally—but five fingers to remind you how to protect your bike:

To summarize (in case that 1970s camp was too much for you to endure the film's full 12 minutes):

(1) Lock your bike 

(2) in a wise location 

(3) with a good chain and lock 

(4) chained around something strong and through both wheels and frame and 

(5) register it in every way you can.

The recommendations hold up pretty well after all these years, and since we haven't quite perfected that secret alarm the narrator fantasizes about (11:10), you best make sure you keep them well in mind.

"Bikes Thieves Get Yiked"

If you're perplexed by the title of this post, you're not the only one. It's from the official YikeBike promo video, and must—I'm relying on context clues here—mean something like "bike thieves get foiled" or "bike thieves got nothing on you." Take a look and see for yourself: 

Motorists should start commuting by YikeBike to avoid parking tickets and gridlock and high prices at the pump, that much is clear, and cyclists should swap their pedal-powered, too readily plunderable rides for the "world's first super light folding electric bike" because its portability means they can take it into the office or restaurant with them? 

I, for one, am not sold. I like pedaling too much to be satisfied zooming around limbs immobile. When it comes to foldable transportation, I think I'm more of a Brompton girl.

A "spiritually starved and hopeless addict..."

"...publicly self-destructing."

That's how one Dave Cutter described your standard-issue bicycle thief in a comment he left on a BikeForums thread I started to encourage cyclists to check out Bike Thieves Beware. Cutter thinks that BTB gives bike thieves too much credit and argues that most bike thefts are committed by opportunists who lack specialized experience. If you're naive or complacent enough—I was—to "secure" your bike with a cable lock, they'll gladly liberate it, but they're not spending hours taking high-tech locks apart to figure out how they work.

"It is not the bicycle thief against the bicycle owner," wrote Cutter. "It is [a] spiritually starved and hopeless addict...publicly self-destructing. Bicycle owners are merely the innocent bystanders who are directly affected."

While, as #5 in "Interview with a Bike Thief" attests, there definitely are some criminals out there actively keeping up with bike owners' latest antitheft strategies (another BikeForums commenter indicated that if he were a bike thief, he might frequent BTB for just that purpose!), Cutter's comment got me thinking about why people steal bikes.

I read this story recently about an unemployed Englishman who stole a bike in order to—so he said—give it to his child as a Christmas present, but the impression I've gotten is that most bike thieves—the habitual ones, anyway—are addicts, hooked on crack or heroin or something similarly strong and destructive.

So isn't the real problem—a problem even more daunting than how to make a two wheeler immune to snatch-and-carry—how to keep could-be thieves out of what commenter Cutter called a "death spiral" of addiction and criminality?  

Interview with a Bike Thief

My Cannondale had Avid BB7s, too. Was it the 
snazzy disc brakes that caught the thief's fancy?

This post was prompted by questions my boyfriend raised after reading "'By failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail.'" He expressed doubts about the deterrent effect a registration sticker would have on a "harder core criminal" and wondered whether the presence of a sticker wouldn't merely encourage a thief to repaint the bike or obliterate the serial number somehow. 

Faced with these questions, I realized how little insight I had into the mind of a bike thief, how ill-equipped I therefore am to anticipate a would-be thief's reaction to, say, my "Death to bike thieves" sticker. Unable to arrange to personally pick the brain of a bike thief (if any of you are reading this and are willing to grant an interview—we can keep it anonymous—avail yourself of the "Write to BTB" gadget in the right sidebar), I instead read every "interview with a bike thief" I could find. I learned a thing or two.

1. How a bike thief locks a bike: If anyone knows how to secure a bike, it ought to be a bike thief, right? So how does a bike thief—currently active or reformed, I don't care—lock a bike? Well, here's what Omar Aziz does. (Omar is a onetime crack addict and bike thief who spoke to Guardian blogger Frederika Whitehead.) He uses two thick chains, through both wheels and the frame. Such chains can be cut, but it takes time and equipment thieves may not have.
2. Never say "I'll come back for it later": Back during his thieving days, if Omar Aziz wanted a bike that was locked on a street too busy for him to be comfortable stealing it when he spotted it, he would puncture the tire to increase the chances of the bike's owner leaving it there longer—maybe even overnight. He told Whitehead: "Someone, if they find their tyre punctured they should take their bike with them, right at that minute because someone has done it on purpose to come and take it after."
3. The Big Apple Is in a Class by Itself: Maybe everyone but me knew this already, but I read in this rather odd one-pager that Kryptonite lock warranties are void in New York City. (I will verify this claim and give the lowdown on lock warranties more generally in a future post.)
4. Yes, David, There Is a Threat from Freezing: This one's for you commenter David. As The Dependent Magazine of Vancouver reports (in what is probably the best instance of the interview-with-a-bike-thief genre I came across): "Beyond bolt cutters and cordless grinders, thieves employ a number of techniques to relieve people of their beloved bicycles. Butane canisters are sprayed into cheap, aluminum locking mechanisms, freezing the components so they can be smashed with a hammer." 
   (I also learned from "Ryan," the thief who informed the Dependent piece, that (1) "nothing" is safe when a thief is equipped with a $200 cordless grinder and (2) "good disc brakes" rank high on the list of attractive components.)
5. There's an Arms Race On: Want an uplifting story of a onetime bike thief who "turned his back on crime after completing a bicycle mechanic course"? Click here. What I got from Shaddouh's tale of redemption is confirmation that those keen to steal bikes pay close attention to what those keen to hold onto them are up to. As Shaddouh told The Docklands & East London Advertiser: "When we had a bit of extra money we would buy a really expensive lock to take apart and research how we could break it for future jobs." I guess that means the current crop of bike thieves is hard at work figuring out how to best tackle the TiGr...

Blessed Be the Bikes

I'm working on a post about bike registries, but in the meantime... I'd heard about the Blessing of the Animals, but the Blessing of the Bicycles? This annual event was news to me.

The Blessing of the Bikes at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City

According to Wikipedia, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City has been holding mass blessings of bicycles since 1999. Riders of all ages and faiths are encouraged to don their cycling clothes and bring their bikes into the cathedral, where a priest prays, sprinkles the two-wheelers with holy water, and presides over a moment of silence in remembrance of cyclists killed in the past year.

Similar events occur in cities from Los Angles to Pittsburgh to Melbourne, Australia. (Blessings are typically held during the spring or early summer, so you've got time to start one in your town.)

I couldn't help but notice, of course, that the "Blessing of the Bicycles" makes mention of bike theft! (More God than I'm comfortable with perhaps, but good stuff otherwise!)

Present in a world groaning under the excesses of consumption, we acknowledge the inherent goodness of non-motorized human powered transportation and give thanks for the simple beauty of the bicycle. God of life, hear our prayer. 

Present in a community filled with children, we pray for those learning to ride. Keep them smart, safe, and visible on their neighborhood roads. God of life, hear our prayer. 

Present in a community filled with strife, we pray for the victims of road rage and bike theft. And we ask for the strength to forgive mean people. God of life, hear our prayer. 

Present in a world of work, we pray for those who build, repair, and clean our bikes and those who rely on bicycles to earn their living. Bless those who choose to not drive to work and those for whom driving isn't even an option. God of life, hear our prayer. 

Present in a community of beautiful diversity, we ask your protection and blessing on all who ride: pedi-cabbies, weekend warriors, athletes, homeless folks, students, children, eco-warriors, bike co-op anarchists, messengers, and all the others who take to the [insert town name here] streets, bike paths, parks, and mountains. Keep us safe as we ride. God of life, hear our prayer. 

We now observe a moment of silence for all who have died while riding...

You F***ing Felon

When, in his epic Outside essay, Patrick Symmes mentioned "the fiscal definition of felony, which varies by state but is typically under the thousand-dollar mark," I was curious: How much does this definition vary from state to state? How is felony theft defined in the District of Columbia, where I live? Did whoever stole my bike commit a felony in so doing?

Now Wikipedia usually comes through with precisely the list I'm looking for, be it a rundown of state nicknames or a catalog of animal collectives, but its "grand theft" article includes information about a paltry 11 states—and "needs attention from an expert in Law."   

So I did what any monomaniacal opponent of bike theft would do; I started running Google searches of the form "[insert state name here] felony theft."

Here's what I discovered:

• The value stolen property must have for its theft to constitute a felony—what I've called "felony threshold" in the table below—varies from $200 (Virginia) to $2500 (Wisconsin).
• Theft of some kinds of property qualifies as a felony regardless of actual monetary value: credit cards, firearms, and motor vehicles fall into this category in many states, but also prescription drugs (North Dakota); license plates (Ohio); cemetery decorations (Georgia); anhydrous ammonia (Idaho); and United States flags used for display, voter registration books, and original copies of court or historic documents (Missouri).
• State statutes are complicated and confusing. (Lots of states, for instance, have done away with or muddled the misdemeanor/felony distinction, favoring instead lettered classes of crimes.)

While I can't—thanks to the third bullet point above—100% vouch for the information in the table below (though I have linked to my sources so you can investigate for yourselves—inform me of any errors you find), I do know this: Whoever took my bike is a felon. I mean, between the Cannondale Trail SL 29er 4 ($800+), the Continental Race King tires ($100), the stop-on-a-dime BB7s ($160), the Lizard Skins lock-on grips, the Topeak BeamRack, the Nite Ize spoke light... Makes me mad just thinking about it.  

State	Felony threshold	State	Felony threshold
Alabama	$500	Montana	$1500
Alaska	$500	Nebraska	$1500
Arizona	$1000	Nevada	$250
Arkansas	$1000	New Hampshire	$1000
California	$950	New Jersey	$500
Colorado	$2000	New Mexico	$500
Connecticut	$2000	New York	$1000
Delaware	$1500	North Carolina	$1000
D.C.	$1000	North Dakota	$500
Florida	$300	Ohio	$1000
Georgia	500 (discretion)	Oklahoma	$500
Hawaii	$300	Oregon	$1000
Idaho	$1000	Pennsylvania	$2000
Illinois	$500	Rhode Island	$500
Indiana	not based on value	South Carolina	$2000
Iowa	$1000	South Dakota	$1000
Kansas	$1000	Tennessee	$500
Kentucky	$500	Texas	$1500
Louisiana	any crime that carries sentence of death or imprisonment	Utah	$1500
Maine	$1000? $5000?*	Vermont	$900
Maryland	$1000	Virginia	$200
Massachusetts	$250	Washington	$750
Michigan	$1000	West Virginia	$1000
Minnesota	$1000	Wisconsin	$2500
Mississippi	$500	Wyoming	$1000
Missouri	$500

*Special thanks to Jeffrey Lovit for helping to clarify the details of theft law in the Pine Tree State. It seems that the threshold there remains at $1000 for the time being.