I feel like somebody broke my leg.
Tucson, Arizona resident Leif Abrell voiced what many of us felt when a bicycle was stolen from us. He lost his custom-made mountain bike in the wee hours of 28 September. Like most bike-theft victims, he didn't see that his trusty steed was gone until it was too late: A noise woke him and he noticed the door to his carport was open. He checked to see whether anything valuable was missing, but in his groggy state, it didn't occur to him to look in the dining room of his midtown home. When he did, he saw that his treasured bike was missing. And he found a much-inferior bike deserted on the side of the street next to his house.
The rest of his story is also all-too-familiar to those of us who've had our wheels whisked away: He reported his loss to the police. While he "didn't have high hopes" for recovering his bike, he clung to "some hopes that something would happen," he recounted. Alas, "nothing really happened," he said.
I learned of Abrell's ordeal from an article on Tucson.com. According to that same article, 1200 bike thefts have been reported to police in "The Old Pueblo". Only about three percent of those cases ended in arrests of suspected thieves and, worse, there's really how many stolen bikes are returned to their rightful owners. As in most cities, the police don't track that.
Perhaps most disheartening of all, 63 percent of this year's bike theft cases were marked as "cleared", meaning they reached some sort of conclusion. Why is that disheartening? Well, most of those cases were closed because there wasn't enough evidence to continue an investigation.
Everything I've mentioned confirms something known to most of us who have had bikes stole: Once it's gone, you'll probably never see it again.
Chris Hawkins, a Tucson police spokesman, echoed a common refrain in explaining why it's so difficult to track stolen bicycles: In most places, "bicycles don't need to be registered like vehicles." And, he says, bicycle owners rarely record serial numbers, which can be entered into databases for access by owners of second-hand shops and other establishments where stolen bikes might end up.
The lack of such records, Hawkins says, is one reason why, even when bikes are retrieved by cops and find their way to the evidence room, they are seldom re-united with their owners.
While Hawkins makes good points, the cynic in me (I am a New Yorker, after all) wonders whether some police departments would actively pursue bike a bike theft even if they had serial numbers and other records. While some officers, like some people in other professions and jobs, simply don't care, others are simply overwhelmed by competing priorities and directives.
Sometimes I think one has the best hope of getting a stolen bike back if a shop owner or mechanic recognizes it--or if its owner encounters it on the street.
Tucson, Arizona resident Leif Abrell voiced what many of us felt when a bicycle was stolen from us. He lost his custom-made mountain bike in the wee hours of 28 September. Like most bike-theft victims, he didn't see that his trusty steed was gone until it was too late: A noise woke him and he noticed the door to his carport was open. He checked to see whether anything valuable was missing, but in his groggy state, it didn't occur to him to look in the dining room of his midtown home. When he did, he saw that his treasured bike was missing. And he found a much-inferior bike deserted on the side of the street next to his house.
The rest of his story is also all-too-familiar to those of us who've had our wheels whisked away: He reported his loss to the police. While he "didn't have high hopes" for recovering his bike, he clung to "some hopes that something would happen," he recounted. Alas, "nothing really happened," he said.
I learned of Abrell's ordeal from an article on Tucson.com. According to that same article, 1200 bike thefts have been reported to police in "The Old Pueblo". Only about three percent of those cases ended in arrests of suspected thieves and, worse, there's really how many stolen bikes are returned to their rightful owners. As in most cities, the police don't track that.
Perhaps most disheartening of all, 63 percent of this year's bike theft cases were marked as "cleared", meaning they reached some sort of conclusion. Why is that disheartening? Well, most of those cases were closed because there wasn't enough evidence to continue an investigation.
Everything I've mentioned confirms something known to most of us who have had bikes stole: Once it's gone, you'll probably never see it again.
Chris Hawkins, a Tucson police spokesman, echoed a common refrain in explaining why it's so difficult to track stolen bicycles: In most places, "bicycles don't need to be registered like vehicles." And, he says, bicycle owners rarely record serial numbers, which can be entered into databases for access by owners of second-hand shops and other establishments where stolen bikes might end up.
The lack of such records, Hawkins says, is one reason why, even when bikes are retrieved by cops and find their way to the evidence room, they are seldom re-united with their owners.
While Hawkins makes good points, the cynic in me (I am a New Yorker, after all) wonders whether some police departments would actively pursue bike a bike theft even if they had serial numbers and other records. While some officers, like some people in other professions and jobs, simply don't care, others are simply overwhelmed by competing priorities and directives.
Sometimes I think one has the best hope of getting a stolen bike back if a shop owner or mechanic recognizes it--or if its owner encounters it on the street.
