Last month, I wrote about a British judge who did something few in the criminal-justice or law-enforcement systems do: He took bike theft seriously. That magistrate, in sentencing thieves, said the monetary value of each the defendants stole is as great as a typical car.
That perception, however incomplete, at least helped the judge understand that stealing those bikes was as serious an offense as other kinds of theft that are, usually, more severely punished.
There are, however, other reasons why bike theft should be as high a priority as other kinds of pilferage. One, which I mentioned in last month’s post, is that our bicycles are, for some of us, an important or primary means of transportation, just as autos are for some other people. And, of course, many of us also ride for recreation and fitness, which are as important as anything else to our individual and collective well-being.
And a broken heart is as deleterious to our overall health as any number of conditions mentioned in the DSM or medical journals. That is what some people suffer with the loss of a bike. Sure, a pair of wheels with a frame and pedals is replaceable—in a material sense, anyway. I could, in the same sense, replace a blanket I own. Monetarily, it’s probably not worth much. But in another sense, it’s priceless, at least to me: My grandmother started, and my mother finished, it.
For some people, a bike can have a similar value, which is often called, dismissively (especially if the one holding the value is female), “sentimental.”
I would bet that many of the bikes on eBay once held “sentimental “ value for someone: The seller’s parent or someone else may have ridden it across a campus, city or country before it was hung in a garage or barn. Or it may have been passed down from a parent to a child.
The latter was the story behind a bicycle stolen from a woman in Millvale, Pennsylvania. She has spent “countless hours” restoring the “priceless family heirloom” to which she attached a baby carrier.
The suspect
Fortunately for her, she has been reunited with her very practical treasure. Police, however, are looking for the man suspected of taking the bike. They found him with the bicycle and, upon questioning, he claimed he owned the bike “forever.”
Of course, no one can make such a claim. But nobody could have come closer to having the right to make it—at least in reference to her “family heirloom”—than its rightful owner.
