There's a proven way to stop bike theft. So why are so few cities doing it?

[Music] [Applause] so riding bikes in cities is the best it's a great it's a great way of getting around it's fun it's efficient it's good for your health it's good for our cities it's good for the climate and when we talk about bike friendliness we often talk about important things like increasing bike infrastructure bike friendly policies like infrastructure bike infrastructure bike infrastructure but there is one thing that's holding back bike friendliness in pretty much every city that rarely gets talked about and it's not just that it erodes our sense of safety and community it feels crime and if it happens to you it's really really annoying and that problem is bike theft but here's the thing there's a solution to this problem a project out there has proven that bike left can be solved well not maybe not solved but at least improved significantly like under this program the drop in the number of stolen bikes is pretty staggering the kind of numbers that you would think would drive this program everywhere but it's not gone viral this idea has been frustratingly slow to spread and that's what this video is about i'm tom and this is shifter a channel all about urban cycling and bike commuting and today i want to tell you about not just the solution to bike theft but try to give you a broader sense of the scope of this problem in the first place because i think we've all become a little bit numb to the negative consequences of bike theft because in the big scheme of things bike theft seems kind of petty especially in a world played with problems like we've got these days but as we're about to explore i'm continually surprised by how deep and how harmful bike theft really is and how much it hurts all of us so hold on at its heart this is a story about two very different guys one is the tech icon who invented the xbox and then had his mountain bike stolen and the other is a veteran cop who was bored with desk duty and it's about their big idea that could go a long way to solving a problem that we've come to accept almost as inevitable in our cities if only their idea would catch on [Music] this is normal my name is noel keough taught for for 15 years in the faculty environmental design at the university of calgary and very active and co-founder of sustainable calories society and not for profit in the city noel is one of the most dedicated urban cyclists i know been a bike commuter for almost 40 years in the city the past 25 years haven't owned a car that is until about two years ago when his bike was stolen i had uh tied it up at the sunnyside lrt uh to a sign a city signpost and i had left it there overnight uh it wasn't something i did infrequently and didn't never had problems with it it was stolen by the time i come back in the morning then just a few weeks later his replacement bike was stolen you know was a little bit more careful i guess i uh i did i bought a better lock i had that one for a matter of months i stopped at the drug shoppers in kensington for two minutes run in get a bag chips run out and i lean my bike up against the wall and try try to kind of keep an eye and when i came out it was it wasn't in there for more than 60 seconds and it came out and it was gone and even a few weeks after that his bike was stolen yes for a third time actually took a couple of months to replace it after that i was kind of shy about about spending again on a bike and just you know kind of disheartened so i ended up buying a lower mid-range uh new bike so i went to to mec and said what's your best lock and bought the best lock they had and i don't think i had it two months i have a habit of going to the y every saturday or sunday with a friend so we went midday saturday it's nice sunny day down to the y and eau claire tied up the bikes out there right in front of the swimming pool went in for a couple of hours workout and came out and the thing had been just sawed right through and tossed to the side and the bike was nowhere to be seen again i remember seeing noel after just after his third bike had been stolen and he was so demoralized and frustrated he was a guy who had spent most of his adult life using a bike as his main form of transportation and he told me at the time that he was considering giving it up i was pretty pissed and very you know disheartened why is it so easy for this to be happening in our city that thousands of bikes are being stolen and there doesn't seem to be any remedy for it and this is the insidious thing about bike theft there's an assumption that most bike thefts happen to you know upper middle class hobby riders who can just go out and buy a new bike but that's not always true sometimes it's people like noel who need a bike just to live their lives and here's another thing we don't even really know how big of a problem bike theft is because we've there's so few real studies or research has been done about bike theft for one thing we don't even really know how many bikes are stolen each year there are some estimates that i've seen that say two million bikes are stolen in the u.s every year some say a bike is ripped off every 30 seconds some estimates say that the number of bikes stolen has doubled over the past 20 years and everyone agrees that a lot of bike thefts and maybe even a majority of them are never even reported so really we have no way of knowing how many are stolen here are some of the things we do know in 2015 researchers at mcgill university in montreal published an actual research paper about bike theft they tried to at least get some of the answers to the fundamental questions about bike theft as they said in the paper the who what where how and when of bike theft montreal is a good place for this it's probably the most bike-friendly city in north america it's great you should go it's amazing city so if you want to start thinking about the implications of bike theft this is a pretty good place to start but let me drop some facts on you from this paper the researchers found that 20 of bike theft victims have had a bike stolen three or more times of those who have had their bike stolen 7.5 don't replace it 15 say they bike less often afterwards and only 2.4 of stolen bikes are recovered just think about those facts for a minute pretty much every city in the world has recognized that getting more people on bikes for transportation is a key part of the future it's great for keeping people active and healthy it's good for street life it can help cities reach their climate targets cities spend so much time and money trying to get more people to ride bikes but at the same time we have this problem of bike lift that is just rampant and a lot of people who lose their bikes never replace it we're missing those people from the matrix of cyclists we also know that bike theft fuels crime it fuels cross-border crime there are the intangibles about it too it can destroy a sense of safety in your own community it fuels cynicism towards police and your neighbors you know for a lot of people getting your bike stolen is not that big of a deal you can always replace it but if you use your bike for transportation and your bike goes missing it can have a massive negative impact on your life bike theft shouldn't just be the cost of living in a city we should recognize these far-reaching implications and because they hurt victims they undermine our efforts to make cities more bike friendly it undermines climate targets it fuels organized crime it demotivates people from riding it destroys a sense of safety in our urban areas and listen to noel this is a guy who loves riding his bike i think more about okay is this a place i should be taking my bike place in a time i should be taking my bike or am i is this going to be risky this theft problem is cramping my lifestyle i just can't enjoy this mode of transportation anymore [Music] i want to show you something you see the number stamped in the frame there [Applause] that's the serial number but what's strange is that the serial number on this bike can be much different than a serial number on another bike in fact in some cases that number is not even a serial number it could be a color code or something like that believe it or not the bike industry has never agreed on a standardized serial number you could look at it like this bikes are the only type of vehicle in north america that does not have a standard vin number a vehicle identification number every other kind of vehicle does i point this out not to criticize the bike industry but seriously come on let's get this together but illustrate a larger point about bike theft and that's the indifference i don't think individuals are apathetic towards bike theft we are all driven crazy by this crime especially when we're the victims or someone we know is the victim but there seems to be a systemic indifference toward bike theft that's kind of built into modern society and that lack of serial number standardization is just one manifestation of that think about your local pawn shop i'm sure there are a lot of bikes sold at pawn shops are legit most of them are but if some of them are stolen does anyone really care does anyone do anything about it think about online resellers i've spoken to many like the victims who blame online reseller resellers such as kijiji for turning a blind eye to people selling stolen bikes on their platform i asked kijiji about this they basically denied it and said they do everything they can to prevent bike theft the safety and security of our 16 million users is paramount they said kijiji commits significant resources toward the detection and prevention of activities that violate policies for posting this includes industry-leading technology and a dedicated community support team in addition to help from an active and supportive community of kijiji users who flag inappropriate postings and cities don't seem to care either when's the last time your city spent any money trying to reduce bike theft yes some cities offer secure bike parking here and there but most cities can barely be bothered to place bike racks in highly visible locations which might do a little bit to prevent bike theft incredibly this indifference even applies to those of us who love bikes how many of us don't buy a decent bike lock how many of us don't bother to lock up a bike when we just pop into a store for five minutes how many of us have even bought a bike used even if the seller seemed kind of sketchy and had no backstory on the bike come on some of us have done that so when you look at how pervasive the problem is and how damaging bike theft is to society it's crazy to me that so few people seem to care on a systemic level but i think most of us have even come to think of bike theft almost as the cost of living in a city but think about that for a second are you okay with nobody caring about bike theft because neither am i [Music] back in the late 2000s there was an uproar in toronto when this guy was arrested his name was igor kink he owned a small bicycle repair shop in the city and his arrest caused a bit of a firestorm in the city that's because for years people in the community thought kank was dealing in stolen bicycles for years they had asked police to step in fruitlessly for years they seized while kink kept on accumulating and reselling bikes that appeared to be stolen when he was finally arrested police say he had more than 3 000 stolen bicycles stashed around the city the city seethed in anger at this guy who became known as the world's most prolific bicycle thief but somehow kink became more than just a bike thief he was charismatic and smart and he seemed to live by his own anti-capitalist code that turned him into sort of an anti-folk hero at least two documentaries and a book have been made about him but what got my attention in the king case can be summed up here this is a quote from the book cank a graphic portrait at one point in the book it quotes robert tajidi a toronto police officer who was speaking about the anger the city felt towards how this guy had stolen bikes with impunity for years here's what he says about the police's perspective on this quote here's the thing most people don't understand we're busy and that's not an excuse but property crime is tough to prosecute we hear the complaints you know that mr king deals on hot bikes so why don't you arrest him well we don't know he's dealing in stolen property we need search warrants and no judge will grant one based on rumor did you catch that here we have the world's most prolific bicycle thief and police for years said basically there's nothing we can do about it and this is the crux of the legal problem of bike theft bike theft is difficult to police it's easy to blame police and victims of bike theft often do it's almost a truism that police don't take bike death seriously the police are busy and i'm sure most people would agree that chasing down murderers or sex offenders is more important it's a question of resources and priorities it's understandable but this creates a weird kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because bike theft is so hard to police people assume the police aren't doing it if they assume the police don't care it creates apathy both in citizens and the police there are estimates that less than half of the people who have their stolen their bike stolen don't even bother reporting it to police and that's usually because they think the police don't care this also creates what i've come to call bike theft vigilantism a couple of years ago i interviewed this woman for a magazine story i wrote her bike was stolen in vancouver she managed to find it being resold online so she arranged to buy it back when she met up with the seller she got on her bike to test ride it and she just rode away basically she stole back her stolen bike and this seems to happen a lot in this case her story went viral she ended up celebrating her vigilantism but this is messed up vigilantism is terrible for the justice system it's also incredibly dangerous for everybody involved but it's that feeling that nobody will do anything about the crime that fuels vigilantism also bike theft isn't always just about bike theft when i've asked police about this problem they often tell me that bike theft fuels other property crime and drug crimes it erodes trust in the police and the justice system also did you know that most police services don't share information about bike theft from city to city there's no national or statewide or province-wide database of stolen bikes in north america which means once a bike ends up in another city or state it's almost impossible for police to track down its rightful owner and this fuels what some police say is a pretty rampant cross-border trade in stolen bikes so blaming police is a simplistic answer to a very complicated problem of the ways the law deals with bike theft [Music] i hope by now i've convinced you that we all should pay more attention to bike theft now i want to introduce you to two guys this is rob brunt my name is rob brunt i'm a detective with vancouver police department right now i'm the liaison officer for project 529 he was a street cop for 25 years then he got into an accident and was assigned to death duty while he recovered the job he said was kind of boring this is jay allard he was once one of the top executives at microsoft he led the team that invented the xbox when he quit microsoft his farewell email made the tech news and one day his bike got stolen it took a while but both of these events set these guys on a course that may end up being our best hope of stopping bike theft but it took a while to get there ron was born on desk duty one day so he went down to vancouver's bike lockup the best way i can describe it is is like a dry cleaning machine like if you go to the dry cleaners but instead of having suits and ties and trousers it has bicycles on it a giant mega facility where police held recovered stolen bikes while they tried to locate the owners the thing in this video behind brunt is a photo of the lockup braun said he was overwhelmed by the sheer number of bikes that he saw being housed in this facility holy smokes like how many bicycles are here he's like there's 500. like wow that goes up two and a half stories into the roof and then they had another 400 bikes on the ground like this was a time when vancouver was one of the worst cities in the world for bike theft 2500 were recovered by police every year not stolen 2500 were recovered the number of deaths was probably exponentially higher than that at this facility there were hundreds of stolen bikes recovered by police but when he asked the people who worked there who was working and getting these bike back into the hands of the owners his answer was well nobody really was man whose job is it to get these bicycles back this is this is crazy he's who he or she is way behind and the guy starts laughing at me he's like like it's we hold them for 90 days and then they then we get rid of them this set runs off on a mission he started researching how police forces around the continent deal with bike theft and he was kind of shocked to find out that almost none of them were doing much of anything about bike theft i can't find anybody in canada doing anything departments and detachments and no no no that's okay i'll i'll figure i'll start looking in the states the americans are smart they you know there's so many cops down there somebody's doing it down there nope can't find anybody again can find the same thing brochures and how to lock your bike how to wear your helmet all that but nothing else you couldn't even find a shared database that listed stolen bikes anywhere so he got permission from his chief to start looking into building a database as a first step but he was a cop and he didn't know much about databases so he was a bit stumped meanwhile allard had left microsoft and was about to enjoy a mountain biking trip in bc when his bike was stolen when he reported it to police he was a little bit dumbfounded by how little was being done to stop bike theft i first met alert a few years ago when he emailed me out of the blue after reading something i had written for the los angeles times he's a really interesting guy he talks a mile a minute he's really smart and he's born to fix problems and bike theft is this thing that just seemed to hit him on a deep level this was a problem that needed fixing and since nobody else was going to do it he decided that he would he sold his vacation home and he used the money to start an online database with the idea that bike owners could upload info and photos of their bikes for free surely once police forces saw this database in action they would start using it right well this is where brunt and allard came together one from vancouver one from seattle one a police officer another one a tech guru brunt needed somebody to build him a database allard needed somebody who understood policing from the inside they didn't know it at the time but this was kind of a match made in heaven but not so fast the two of them quickly realized that a database alone wasn't going to solve this problem so the two of them started on a mission they started talking to everyone they could about bike theft store owners bike advocates community organizers and slowly their ideas started to come together into a plan to make a long story short brendan allard along with a lot of help from people in vancouver community owners volunteers all kinds of people implemented a full anti-bike theft program in the city and guess what it worked like it seriously worked the first year the number of bikes stolen in vancouver dropped by 20 the next year it dropped another 30 at granville island a popular tourist area in vancouver 33 bikes were stolen in one summer month before the program started after that the number fell to seven in the years since the number of thefts have stayed low and in some places has continued to fall okay i'm going to stop here for a minute to explain something this is the point in the story where everybody usually says something like well tell me the secret what did they do to solve this problem was it an app was it some kind of gps and the answer is it was all of these things but none of these things what worked was a long-term community-wide commitment to preventing bike theft sure the heart of the program is alerts database which is called five to nine garage but just uploading a photo of your bike isn't enough they've spent years encouraging people to register their bikes and they sell shields which are these little stickers basically that people put on their bikes to warn thieves that the bike is registered but they've done so much more they've worked with bike shops get new bikes automatically registered when they're sold community groups have jumped on board to relocate bike racks to more visible locations store owners have created programs where they lend bike locks to customers who don't have a bike lock with them there's been big education programs on how to properly lock your bike festival and event organizers have gone on board and started providing secure bike parking at big events in other words the secret is everybody works really hard on a whole bunch of little things and they all seem to come together there's no shortcut it requires buy-in from police from community groups from cyclists even those who who hate the idea of bike registries this is different from a car registry we'll get back to we'll get to this later but the point is this works what allard and brunt and everybody else in vancouver have proved is that this seemingly intractable problem of urban life maybe isn't intractable after all so in in vancouver itself we're really rocking it we've got it we've got it down to a pretty good art form our bike theft is still even with covid and all the extra riders our bike theft is still down 40 we wouldn't have done anything uh and kept business as usual with bike theft in vancouver from 2015 we were on a projection to uh for this year to have about 7 000 bikes would have been stolen instead we're at about 1500 that difference is eight million dollars in one year not arresting more people they're not you know our bike thiefs aren't going to jail longer nothing's changed on that front but what i feel the big difference is is the five to nine shield on the bicycle to show that the bicycle's registered the crooks know the bikes registered they're not interested in getting stopped with it the program proved to be so successful that brunt's chief gave him the go-ahead to start bringing the program to programs in other cities so finally a solution to this problem was at hand with results like this this idea was sure to go viral right who wouldn't jump on board well something happened [Music] after the success of the program in vancouver allert and brunt hit the road they started pitching the idea to police forces all over north america and even into south america and they had their pitch down our bert and ernie routine they jokingly say but over and over the same thing kept happening they would meet a receptive member of a police force who would get excited and say he was going to take this back to the brass for approval and then nothing it happened over and over and over again the receptive cop would call back a few weeks later and say sorry we can't find the resources or sorry chief says this isn't a priority right now this great idea had come up against something that was perhaps even more powerful bureaucracy one of the things is um who's responsible for this so when i travel with uh they'll be like wow is it a police problem is it a you know trans is a transportation problem and if it's a transportation problem is it the city or is it the you know ministry uh or the province you know like everybody wants to point fingers and go okay you know jay told me recently that having the police on board is key it's the first step everything else in the program falls from that but that's proven to be the toughest part police forces all over the place either can't or they won't find the resources or cut through the red tape to get this program started but you'll go to another city and they'll be like well this isn't a police thing this is a bike store thing and then you'll go to the city and they'll go well this isn't a city thing it's a cop thing and you know it's now and now i feel like a dog chasing his tail because i'm trying to run and you know get another city on board and just like wow this this is a this is a people thing right everybody should be involved let's just stop here and consider things for a moment here we have a problem of urban crime and a program that pretty much solves it i mean it doesn't put an end to bike theft but it it's been proven to make a pretty significant dent in it and all it needs to kick off really is as rob told me one dedicated police officer there needs to be a rob brunt in every city one person just one but that is proving to be too much for so many cities cities can't find one person to dedicate to this to my knowledge tom i'm the only full-time police officer in canada or the united states that focuses on this full-time personally i find this incredibly frustrating and i can't imagine how it must feel to be jay and rob who have put so much of their own energy and passion into this both of them are eternally optimistic and they say they're going to keep trying and they are making small wins here and there it's it's super frustrating um but but then i get to do my stuff that's local in vancouver and so like today this morning i had two recoveries where i get to talk to the owners you know and that's fantastic right like is it like as a cyclist to phone another cyclist and go hey um detective pro brunch um you had your bike stolen yeah yeah um yeah i've got it and it's in pristine condition can you come get it oh you know thank you thank you and i'm like well you're welcome but you did the work you registered the bike without you registering the bike the story was wouldn't happen it would go it would have got recovered but it wouldn't have got back to you and it would have went to auction rob has told me on a couple of occasions that his biggest concern is that jay is funding so much of this project from his own pocket it's not his he's not even canadian it shouldn't be his responsibility to fund a bike theft program in canada like since the government somebody needs to step up and take care of this i don't want this to sound like an ad for 529 garage there are other online databases out there doing good work and you should absolutely use them a lot of them are even linked together there are other police programs out there and what's happened in vancouver isn't rocket science it's hard work it really could pop up anywhere i mean these days are also there are also some promising tech advances i'm hearing about gps enabled bikes bluetooth pedal locks better bike racks apps but i don't think there's a quick and easy tech fix to this problem it takes the community working together to solve bike theft which is also the biggest challenge that brings me to a thought i want to share to end this video i've been covering bike there for several years now and i've learned a lot that we as regular old people riding bikes can do to prevent bike theft buy good luck and actually use it don't buy bikes that you suspect might be stolen register your bike with an online registry and bike advocates out there don't get all worked up about the words bike registry this is completely different from the idea of registering bikes to enforce traffic violations that some uninformed anti-bike people talk about all the time this is a voluntary anti-theft online registry much different if your bike is stolen report it to police even if you don't think they will recover it report it we need better data everywhere and lastly this might be the biggest challenge it's just show that you care about bike theft one of the big impediments to solving this problem is the impression that nobody cares about it but bike theft matters and the more of us who start to think and speak and advocate for it the more likely we are to finally find a way to solve this problem thanks for watching

Channel: Shifter

Views: 225,641

Keywords: Cycling, Theft, Crime, Bike Theft, Bicycles, Bikes, Urban cycling, Bike Commuting, road cycling, electric bikes

Id: 48V9Xtpgq9I

Length: 27min 57sec (1677 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CandyMonsterRottina]

tldw: A database where people register their bikes (including the bike shops when they sell the bikes), small stickers to put on the bikes to show they are registered, a police officer working full-time on the project, and a programmer funding the project.

[u/MinnesotaMikeP]

BikeIndex.org offers free registration and can help retailers install POS software to register bikes. Go bug your local shop until they get on board.

[u/jonpurkis]

I just watched this and thought it was worth sharing, it goes into the complicated problems of bike theft and what they've done in Vancouver to tackle the problem.

[u/nientoosevenjuan]

I went to college and lived in South florida. When I moved down there I had a pretty good bike for college student. It lasted about a month. After I graduated I was a little bit bike shy but I bought one at a garage sale. And it was properly stolen too. After that I went through a succession of pawn shop huffy and mongooses anything under $50 was my ride. I tried every kind of lock available. There's a cottage industry in Florida with stolen bikes of any type are put into shipping pods and sent down to the Caribbean islands. Friend of mine told me that he was down there and he saw a lot of carbon frames bikes spray painted bright colors which he thought was funny but he didn't put two and two together.

[u/LaLaLaLuuuuuuuke]

I'm somewhat torn on Project 529. On the one hand, I think it's absolutely phenomenal and I love it endlessly. I tell everybody I know to register their bikes, and I always make sure that my bike has an up-to-date photo in the database.

On the other hand, they are quite pro-police. I understand that involving the cops is kind of the secret sauce in making this all work, but after the past year of watching cops tear gas innocent people, club/arrest journalists, and kill unarmed people, I don't like it.

[u/greaper007]

I didn't watch. Is the solution smart guns in the seat post? Because I really want it to be. TESTICLE DEATH TO BIKE THIEVES!!

[u/MarcusCaspius]

1. the cops are useless.
2. judges are weak as a wet bus ticket.
3. there are no consequences and it is a gateway crime.
4. criminals have more rights than victims.

[u/SouperSausage]

It seems there's only a small number of bike thieves who commit a disproportionate amount of the crime. Why don't the police just use more bait bikes, probably wouldn't be difficult to install a GPS inside as well. Is it entrapment if the bike is locked up like any other?