Editor’s note: When a Minneapolis resident and longtime bicyclist recovered his neighbor’s stolen bike last summer after it was posted for sale online, the troubling and somewhat harrowing experience led him to a long introspection about bike theft. In this second part of the story, he discusses how bike owners can make bike theft more difficult; click here to read Part One.
As a usually non-violent property crime that’s perceived to have a low community impact, bicycle theft seems to be allocated few investigative resources to help make it less common. And that low-priority rating seems unlikely to change. Why? Bicycles are easy to steal. Police can’t or won’t do much. Sentencing doesn’t deter. Offenders repeat. Victims are left to solve their own crimes and recover their own property. Whack-a-Mole, Cat-and-Mouse, the Wild West.
It’s discouraging.
There are many important details we don’t know about bike theft in the Twin Cities:
- Where, when and under what circumstances does it most often occur?
- How do bike thieves identify and target their victims?
- What features of garage construction do thieves exploit to gain entry?
- Where, besides Facebook and the corner pawn shop, are stolen bikes converted to spendable cash? And so many more.
One thing is clear: Making a bike harder to steal begins with locking it — and properly.
— Mike Vogl
The answers are necessary to craft and deploy better strategies for making bike theft less attractive, and to protect the people who own and ride bicycles and their property; unfortunately, few hard facts about bike theft in the Twin Cities appear to exist — even and especially from police departments.
Until such data becomes available to guide us, the best risk-reduction strategy is simple: This one is on us, the owners and riders of bicycles.
Focus on Prevention
We simply must do more to protect our bikes from being stolen. This begins with a not-rocket-science acknowledgement: Almost any bike can be stolen given enough time, effort and cover. Therefore, our goal in better protecting our bikes is to make stealing them take too much time, or require too much work, or create too much noise and attention. Achieving that may mean that many of us must rethink how we store, secure and even use our bicycles.
For me, that meant a lifestyle change that has been immensely disappointing: I no longer use even a cheap bike for errands anymore if I have to turn my back on it while it’s locked in a public place. For me, the consequence of having a bike stolen outweighs the satisfaction and benefits of using a bike for commuting to all the places and for all of the reasons I once did. So now I ride — frequently, still — for pleasure and fitness but almost never where I might have to leave my bike unsupervised, even if I could paralyze it in place with a pannier-full of heavy U-locks.
So long as cordless angle grinders and other cheap tools make effectively protecting my bike in public places take much more effort than I’m willing to devote anymore, I concede defeat to whomever are the (insert pejoratives here) who steal bikes for a living.
Your mileage, of course, and your risk tolerance, may vary. You may be comfortable leaving your bike unattended for whatever length of time, in whatever places you’ve decided are worth the risk.
But bike security is a game of chance: If we want to increase the odds in our favor, we must make it more difficult to steal them in most circumstances. It falls to us to do more ourselves, because addressing bike theft has not been identified — and funded — as a community value or priority, at a level that will achieve dramatic results. I’m sorry, and I wish this were not true. It means bike owners must be their bikes’ best advocates.
How can we do that?
To repeat: Any bike can be stolen from almost anywhere, given enough time, effort and cover. Decide if you’re doing enough to deny potential thieves each of those consistently. Apply critical thinking and not just wishful thinking: Are there risks of your bike being stolen you may be overlooking or underestimating?
Bringing a bike inside the places we shop and work should be as normalized as it is for a baby stroller.
— Mike Vogl
Here are my suggestions:
- Published studies about bike theft in urban areas show that a remarkably high number of stolen bikes were not locked. Whatever the reasons — “forgot my lock,” “can’t afford a lock,” “it seemed like a safe place,” “it was only for a minute” — one thing is clear: Making a bike harder to steal begins with locking it and learning how to lock it properly.
- Bike-lock technology lags the technology for defeating bike locks. Even a heavy, expensive, name-brand U-lock or chain can be compromised; a cheap one can be sliced apart as if it was made of cookie dough. Cutting bike locks may be noisy, of course, but that’s irrelevant if no one is around, or awake, to hear it. And even if someone sees it happening and calls the police, their response to such a crime-in-progress may be less urgent than we think it should be.
- Make hard choices about whether and how locking your bike will protect it sufficiently. By the nature of its design and removable parts and accessories, a bike is difficult to secure effectively with only one lock; two or three good (and heavy, bulky) locks may still not be enough given the circumstances (think: time, effort, cover). Sometimes thieves simply cut apart and steal the entire rack with the locked bike still attached. Even proper locking is no guarantee of absolute protection; is that a risk you can accept?
- Never, ever use a cable-style bike lock, without accepting that such locks are remarkably fast and easy to cut — noiselessly — with even some garden tools.
- We must work to overcome objections to bringing our bikes indoors with us in public places, and petition loudly for policy changes and indoor bike parking options where that could be feasible and appropriate. I think bringing a bike inside a public business —a coffee shop or grocery store, for example — should be as normalized as it is for a baby stroller.
- Exterior lighting and cameras alone can’t deter theft. The guy who broke into my neighbor’s garage simply turned his head away from a floodlight and video camera as he strolled past them down the alley to steal her bike. Good exterior lighting is important, and cameras may help answer some questions, but their crime-deterrent value has limits.
- Record the serial number of your bike and take good current photos of the bike itself. Keep the serial number in your phone so you can produce it quickly if your bike is stolen or your ownership is contested. If you don’t know where to find the serial number on your bike, or if it is obscured by dirt or time, ask someone knowledgeable to help, or take it to a bike shop. Recovering your stolen bike will often depend on how quickly you can prove it really is yours.
- Register your bike with an online registry such as bikeindex.org. If your bike is stolen, registration might be the only way you will get it back if it is recovered. Always call the police if your bike is stolen, and if you live in the Twin Cities post it (using the specified format) at the Facebook page, Twin Cities Stolen Bikes 2.0.
- The underground parking garage of your condo or apartment building is a risky place to store a bike, even if there is a locked storage room or other key-only access; bring it inside your living space instead. Can that be a nuisance? Yes. Will it better protect your bike? Definitely.
- Beef up the security of the garages, sheds and other places where bikes are commonly stored. We must look at our property like a thief does: Those little windows in the garage service door, the bigger window on the garage wall? Cover them with plywood on the inside. That cheap, non-deadbolt lock on the door? A screwdriver can defeat it. Leave a garage door open for even a moment? Only if you are willing to risk that “a moment” may be all it takes for your property to disappear.
- One voice missing in this discussion is that of the many committed bike commuters who persistently succeed in not having their bikes stolen. Despite leaving their bikes unattended hundreds or thousands of times a year in broadly different settings and circumstances, they return each time to find their bikes still safely secured and ready for the next trip. What is their secret? How do they balance the possibility of theft and the effort and cost to prevent it, against the personal and community rewards of bike commuting? I’d guess it’s more than luck or a shrug-the-shoulders attitude about the risk. I’d like to hear how they approach prevention.
Taking steps to reduce bike theft may be inconvenient, expensive, and require changing how we store, secure and even use our bikes.
— Mike Vogl
Taking strong steps to reduce the risk of bike theft may be inconvenient — and expensive. It might mean changing how we store, secure and even use our bicycles. It’s understandable to be angry and to rightfully complain about how we live at a time and in a place where people just effing suck when they steal from one another.
I get it.
Please understand, I’m not victim-blaming. Instead, I am advocating that reducing the chances of losing a prized bicycle to theft can require tough love and hard decisions on our part, to achieve a better balance of risk-versus-reward.
Final Thoughts
In the immediate weeks after my neighbor Kristin’s bike was stolen and recovered, I heard nothing from the police departments in either Minneapolis (where the bike was stolen) or St Paul (where it was recovered), despite having identified for them a person possibly responsible. Weeks became months, and then, one day, I got a call from a prosecutor in the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office.
The person I had identified — “Josh,” I’ve called him here — had been arrested on a felony charge related to the theft of Kristin’s bike, and prosecution of the case was underway. Kristin and I were invited to submit written statements to the court about how the theft affected us and to attend upcoming legal proceedings, including a trial if it went that far. We did, of course.
It’s now January 2025, and there has been no adjudication. Josh — who was already on probation when he was arrested for his involvement with Kristin’s stolen bike — has refused more than one proposed plea agreement, and additional hearings are scheduled. Victim advocates for the county attorney’s office have kept us in the loop.
We’ve been told to expect these realities: Bicycle theft in the Twin Cities, if an arrest and conviction occurs at all, usually ends with a sentence that is slap-on-the-wrist lenient. And financial restitution, if ordered, has no enforcement provision to ensure it is made in whole or part.
Therefore, it falls to all of us — cyclists, police, prosecutors and the businesses we support by bike — to begin taking comprehensive steps to make stealing bicycles more difficult and less rewarding. Maybe some kind of forum, or summit, about bike theft could be organized — by Streets.mn, the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition, the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota and other organizations — to bring together stakeholders and discuss the extent of the problem, its impacts and potential solutions, including a review of home security and properly locking our bikes. Maybe a bicycle-related business would donate discounted deadbolt locks for a neighborhood-wide retrofit. Given how much bicycles contribute to the physical and emotional quality of life for individuals and families, the community benefits would be enormous.
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