The Chainlink

Go buy something at Iron Cycles, or just give the people there a hug.

Just off the phone with the victim:

http://chicago.stolenbike.org/node/190060

Anytime a stolen bike makes it back to its true owner it warms the cockles of my heart, but this case is especially special as Jake is the son of my best friend's friend and her kids' regular playmate before they moved away-- first met him when he was maybe 5 or 6; he's also part of Chicago cycling's 'first family' (i.e. resident and product of Randy Nuefeld's hippy coop-commune home-schooling mafia.)

Hip hip hooray for Iron Cycles.

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At a certain point it is hard to tell what is stolen and what isn't. Sure, a whole bike with unmentioned pinlocks (and no key/tool to go with them) and the serial number filed off is a bit obvious.

But I like to snatch up bike parts at garage sales. People buy stuff with the intention of putting them on their bikes and never get around to it so I sometimes find like-new parts often with the decaying original packaging still partially attached. Other times people buy upgrades and keep the old parts around and finally sell them at a garage sale cheap. Either way it's a great way to find stuff at only a fraction of the new retail prices if you know what you are doing. Sometimes you get stuff that is harder to use. I've got a set of French 25mm-clamp drop bars that I'm still trying to figure out how to use. I don't carry a pair of calipers when I go garage sale shopping. Maybe I should!

Where many of those parts stolen or maybe just stuff people had laying around for years and their legitimate property? If it was in a huge pile of scrapped-out parts then maybe it could be fishy. But many other things aren't so cut and dry.

Can you just size someone up and tell by looking at him (or her) and the stuff he's got for sale and spot a thief? Or do we start getting into racial/classl profiling here? I'm cheap as hell and fairly allergic to buying retail, and I believe in the concept of Reduce, Re-use, & Recycle. Putting old unloved and unwanted bike parts back into service is a GOOD thing for the environment -but I wince at the thought that I could have just given money to a bike thief, and thus incentivized his behavior.
James, you can confidently size up a person who is selling a nice bike for $120, in an alley, as a bike thief. If I were you, I wouldn't spend a ton of time worrying about whether some old parts someone is selling at a garage sale were stolen or not.

James Baum said:
Can you just size someone up and tell by looking at him (or her) and the stuff he's got for sale and spot a thief?
So you are saying legitimate sellers don't work out of an alley and sell whole bikes (or sometimes most of the bike missing the front wheel) for 20% of retail?

LOL

Sometimes Craigslist sales seem pretty fishy too. I used to think my dad didn't have a clue what he was talking about when I was a kid but when I grew up I realized he wasn't so dumb. He always said when something was too good to be true it probably wasn't...
Awesome! My local shop too, just down the street from my home.
Thanks again to Howard (Stolen Bike Registry) and Brandon (Iron Cycles). May your tires never go flat.

Im Jake’s (victim’s) dad. Jake is out of town right now in college so Ill try to speak for him. This system works. This system works because it is designed and supported by people who know bicycles.

On the day of the theft, the police were very helpful and spent hours with us on the investigation, getting a good set of fingerprints and detailing a report with us. I believe they are still working on finding the thief and I have more faith in them than I used to. Thanks to them as well.

Police reports rely heavily on the serial number of the bike. This bike was a gift to Jake so he didn't have a receipt and admittedly we failed to properly document the serial number (which all the rest of you SHOULD NOT DO). But the fact that the serial number was immediately removed by the thief begs the question of how good the police system is. After the bike was recovered by Iron Cycles and the Stolen Bike Registry, I was able to prove to the police that the bike was Jake’s by producing the pinhead locking hub key and removing the wheel that had the flat tire that brought the bike into Iron Cycles in the first place. If the police had recovered the bike by their own resources it may have been harder for them to connect the bike with Jake since their locator criteria are the serial numbers which thieves remove.

The police report was important in the recovery of the bike, but in and of itself may not have been successful. This is why an alternative bicycle centered system is so crucial to supplement the police work. Howard at the stolen bike registry took a detailed description of the bike, accepted photographs and disseminated the information through the bicycle community. Brandon at Iron Cycles had the presence of mind to size up the person who brought the bike in and then cared enough to take time away from a busy morning at the bike shop to look on the registry, call the police and suffer through that ordeal in his place of business.

So, what we’ve learned out of all this is:
Document the unique identifying features of your bicycle in addition to your serial number. Take photos of it.
Depend on your local alternative systems to assist with the police work..The Chicago Stolen Bike Registry is an effecitve system. I’ve heard of a number of other successful bike recoveries through similar grass roots systems.
Support your local bike shops, like Iron Cycles. The more neighborhood centered we get the more power we have.

Update: 5/28/2011-

We've learned that the thief was arrested Thursday night and was supposed to be charged yesterday.

The police had taken fingerprints of the window the thief broke in last July; in February they called the victim to report they had a match, and put out an APB for the thief's arrest.

 

http://chicago.stolenbike.org/node/190060



Brandon Elliott said:


Hopefully the true thief gets what he has coming to him.
Great story. Weird thing about the locking skewers is that a leather punch will take em off.
What is a leather punch?
It's a tool to make clean holes in leather.  You can get them in a few different form factors from something that looks like pliers to a chisel type thing that you hit with a hammer to drive it through leather.

Eric said:
What is a leather punch?
Potato Peeler.
Whew, just thankful its nothing related to that "other" punch.....yeah you know what I'm talking about!

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