Another long-term recovery

Just wanted to share another SBR success story:

Thought you might like to know that stolenbicycleregistry.com just helped me recover my bike more than seven months after it was stolen. I was walking through Chapel Hill, NC tonight and spotted my bike u-locked to a post; it had been stolen in October. Luckily, the police substation was about 200 feet away. The officer came to inspect the bike, but when she went to check if it had been reported stolen it turned out the police had never put my serial number in the database correctly. I remembered I'd registered on your site, so I used a police computer at the substation to look up my entry. It had the serial number, so I was able to get the cop to recover the bike for me when the guy came to unlock it five minutes later. So basically, thanks again and again. I still can't believe I have my bike back, if a little worse for the wear.
-Andy K.

I think our current record for long-term recovery still stands at one year, but these always make me smile. :)

Spring Is Here - Watch Your Bike

Every year, without fail, once the weather gets warm again we see a sharp uptick in the number of stolen bikes being registered.

It's no surprise - spring is here and more people are out riding. And this means prime opportunity for thieves. So we're seeing 6-10 registrations a day where we used to see 2-3.

Long story short: Keep an eye on your bike, folks.

Bike Theft Statistics

Every now and then I'll hear from someone looking for bike theft statistics. Just this week I had a conversation with a journalist looking for theft statistics by city, and it brought me back to hunting down some hard-to-find numbers. I thought I'd wrap up some of the major issues in one post.

Long sotry short: It's real hard to get statistics on bike theft.

First, the problem is so common that few people who get their bikes stolen bother reporting it. So right off the bat, data's missing.

Second, the statistics that do come in are all over the place - a bike lock study here, a college campus report there, or a 'general crime trends' study. There are often many disparate sources, often focusing on different aspects of the problem.

Third, when there are crime reports that include bike theft (see below) the numbers are often lumped under such broad categories - larceny, petty theft, property theft - and this makes deducing any finer-grained trends difficult.

There are a couple of sources worth highlighting:

1) Just this week an article popped up ok UK bike theft stats - it quotes the Home Office as saying 480,000 bikes stolen in 2006-07.

2) Every year the FBI puts out a "Uniform Crime Report" which reports overall crime trends and statistics for the US. Bike theft is lumped under Property Crime / Larceny-Theft. Their numbers do break the problem down by region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West) but lumps bike theft into a percentage of total larceny reported. For the record, their data says 231,238 bikes were stolen in 2006, down a bit from 248,792 in 2005.

3) Kryptonite, the lock makers, put out a yearly "Top ten worst bike theft cities" list as a press release. (For some reason this release isn't anywhere on the Kryptonite site, but one of their employees has blogged about the recent one here)

Know of any other bike theft resources out there? Let me know.

WA Podiatrist Caught With $55k in stolen bikes and gear

This one's a weird one - From The Daily News Online 's "Bicycle-Theft Investigation Gains Traction" (see what they did there?)

A Longview doctor suspected of swiping pricey racing bicycles in three states was caught because of ordinary things he left behind: a coffee cup labeled "Jake," a baseball cap and a pair of slippers, according to police reports. The items were left at a bike shop in the Seattle area last February after a man took a test ride of a $6,800 Cervelo-R3 racing bike and never returned.

... Police said they found five stolen bicycles and other stolen bicycle-related items in his garage, and another stolen bicycle in his office ...

In August, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab informed Seattle police that DNA on the items matched Jacob Jonathon Bos, 35, a Longview podiatrist and a member of Three Rivers Cycling Club.

Friends of Bos who purchased bicycles from him - including the Cervelo-R3 stolen Feb. 2 - have met with investigators and returned the bikes. Investigators have recovered more than $55,000 worth of stolen bicycles and accessories. The bikes were stolen in the Seattle metropolitan area, Portland metropolitan area and Utah, where Bos' children live...

Here's the fully story.

Update: "Man charged in high-end bicycle thefts takes his own life"

... all in all, a very, very weird story.

Announcing Mobile.stolenbicycleregistry.com!

I'm happy to announce that you can now run bike serial numbers on your cellphone at mobile.stolenbicycleregistry.com!

Just point your phone's browser to mobile.stolenbicycleregistry.com and enter your email address - and then enter the serial number of any bike in question.

If it's registered in the Stolenbicycleregistry.com database, all of the bike's pertinent information will be shown - model, year, color, city, date stolen, owner contact info, and description. A full copy of your search is then emailed to you, complete with links to the bike and any photos on file with Stolenbicycleregistry.com.

Below are some videos that demonste how Mobile.stolenbicycleregistry.com works - one's on a BlackBerry, and other other is on an old-school Cingular browser.

Mobile.stolenbicycleregistry.com on a BlackBerry

Mobile.stolenbicycleregistry.com on an old-school Cingular mobile browser

We're pretty excited about this one - it's one thing for us to maintain the database at stolenbicycleregistry.com, but once we've turned every single cellphone onto the process as well, we're pretty excited about what that can do. We anticipate many more stolen bike hits 'in the field'.

We look forward to some more amazing recoveries :) So far we've tested it out on a Blackberry World Edition, a Nokia E61, and a Motorola V180 - please drop us a line if you have comments!

Donate to the SBR, get an awesome sticker

I have some serious additions coming online in the next two weeks, but I couldn't resist posting this one. Donate $2.50 to the SBR right now and I'll send you one of these slick vinyl stickers! Not only will you be helping supporting the cause, but you'll making your intentions clear to any future would-be bike thieves out there.

Simply click the sticker of your choice, donate, and I'll get the thing in the mail ASAP. Don't forget to provide a mailing/shipping address!

StolenBicycleregistry.com now supports Canadian listings!

I've been getting requests to support Canadian bike listings for years now, and I'm happy to announce that I have finally added this in. Select your appropriate country - USA or Canada - when you're listing a stolen bike, and the rest happens automatically.

I'm looking forward to providing the same free online bike recovery resources to all the Canadian bikers out there I have heard from, and I am looking forward to seeing some good recoveries from you guys :)