Montreal City Weblog

Kate 07:52 on 2020-08-18 Permalink Reply  

• Meezly 14:42 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  There’s a certain kind of low when someone steals a bike that has a kid seat or chariot. I’m on a parent google group and someone recently had her bike stolen in the 20 minutes she took shelter from the rain at a pizza place with her two toddlers. Not sure if it was locked or not, but I assume it was. She relied on that bike during the pandemic and was beyond upset.

  So please be careful with your bikes out there!

• Kate 15:20 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  I don’t think bike thieves have a moment to waste on who might own the bike or have need of it. My first stolen bike was a second-hand one-speed (before that was cool), stolen from outside my high school. It was clearly not a rich kid’s toy, but someone thought it was worth taking.

  If thieves think anything, they think we’re fools to leave property where they can easily take it, and we deserve what we get. But I don’t think they even exercise their imaginations to that extent.

• Ephraim 15:42 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  My first bike had a pedal fall off, so I ended up learning how to ride it with the missing pedal. Certainly kept it from being stolen… they didn’t know how to drive off with a missing pedal.

  But that being said, who’s going to stop bike theft? The police? They are a reporting agency with a record of recovery of stolen items that is as effective as swiss cheese to catch water. Like with everything else, it is going to either take a concerted effort to make bike’s unsellable on a secondary market, or people taking enough care that they aren’t stolen. Heck, cars are a heck of a lot larger and the police can’t find them when stolen, either…. and there have all kinds of marking to prevent theft.

• dwgs 16:06 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  Unless it’s a high end bike the thief is usually a junkie or a crackhead or similar. Back when I used to work in bars we would see stolen stuff on the regular. These people are not stopping to debate the ethics of stealing from little kids or inconveniencing their parents.

• MarcG 16:13 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  I also understand the stolen-bike problem to actually be a poverty/addiction problem.

• Kate 17:23 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  Any theft can be that, MarcG, and a quick opportunistic theft might be. But I think it’s often a question of low cunning and greed. Toula Drimonis wrote this week about how her bike was stolen, along with a bunch of other bikes, from the parking space in her condo building in St-Henri. That took planning, and it also meant having a truck to haul the stolen bikes away. That’s a lot more than your average junkie has to hand.

• MarcG 18:01 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  Maybe I’m naive but I find it hard to believe that someone who’s not poor or addicted would steal a bunch of bikes in order to sell for them for, what, a thousand bucks? Is it possible that some people make a normal life (paying rent, buying groceries) out of schemes like that?

• Kate 18:03 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  On a larger scale, yes. Absolutely yes.

• Blork 18:22 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  I’ve only had one bike stolen, many years ago when I lived on de Bullion just below Mont-Royal. I made the mistake of locking it for a few minutes outside of my apartment but not locking it TO anything. Gone.

  Miraculously, I found it an hour later, leaning against a fence in a parking lot a couple of blocks away, the lock still attached. I guess the thief had left it there while going to get a saw or bolt cutters.

• Meezly 18:39 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  @MarcG. yes, absolutely. There are indeed networks of professional bike and/or stroller thieves working the neighbourhoods that do this as a business and probably make a living out of it. Higher end strollers and chariots are prime targets as they are harder to lug up the stairs of upper floor apartments so tend to be left outside.

  I’ve seen enough surveillance footage to see that most thieves are very cunning, organized and opportunistic. One parent reported that one thief scoped out their stroller around 1:30am, first time to check how the stroller was locked. Then he left (presumably to his car) and came back with snipers, cut the lock, left again to put his sniper away (I suppose to not get caught with snipers AND a stolen stroller at the same time), then came back one last time and walked away with the stroller.

  It’s true. Whether you’re a thief out of desperation or profession, you’re not considering how you’re inconveniencing someone by stealing. There is a certain level of scumbaggery that is a personality requirement for organized theft.

• Blork 18:43 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  This would be a good time for a re-watch of “Bicycle Theives,” the Italian neo-realist film from Vittorio De Sica (1948).

• js 19:28 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  Isn’t there some way to put homing devices on decoy bikes to find out where thieves take them? If every cyclist in town contributed say a buck there’d be plenty of moolah to be awarded to vigilante “biker gangs” comprised of fed-up cyclists to track down and extirpate bike theft rings.

• CE 19:38 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  Here’s a nice little short film that gets inside the heads of bike thieves and those who have had their bikes stolen.

• Kevin 22:38 on 2020-08-18 Permalink

  Js
  Yes. They are not cheap.

  I’d rather our mayor order police to crack down on bike theft and the shops that sell stolen bikes.

• Ephraim 11:46 on 2020-08-19 Permalink

  Kevin – The police can’t crack down on bike theft. Heck, they can’t crack down on car thefts or murders, either. Listen to the You’re Wrong About: Murder podcast for a basic understanding of police solving crimes or rather, don’t. The biggest job of the police is taking police reports, not actually solving crimes… solving crimes is TV fiction. It’s one of the reasons that people want reform.

  I’ll give an example of police corruption so that people better understand this. Police love to get overtime because… well, it’s overtime… higher pay, brings up their pension funds, etc. So, how do you get overtime when you can’t get overtime? Arrest someone for a crime just before the end of your shift. It doesn’t matter if it sticks or doesn’t stick, because you aren’t responsible for prosecution. But you can’t go home until all the paperwork is done and that’s… overtime.

  Now, there are multiple ways to stop this, for example, have partners on two different 8 hour shifts that are 4 hours apart. You arrest someone near the end of your shift, your partner has to do the work. But they don’t. And they don’t really look at the stats for this, but in cities where this happens, prosecutors know about it and just toss those cases. But it is corruption. It’s like bartenders who overpour for tips… it’s stealing/corruption, but who’s going to stop them? You have to watch everything they do. There is even more corruption, like statistical corruption.

  Unless everyone had their bike’s marked and had a tracker, the police do absolutely NOTHING but take a report. Oh and hope you don’t report your bike as stolen, because that increases their reported crime statistic. Ever feel like they really don’t want to take your report? That’s because they don’t want to… if you report crime, it ruins their statistics.

• Kate 17:51 on 2020-08-19 Permalink

  Ephraim, we really do not have a murder problem here. We don’t get many murders, and most are either domestic (and it’s obvious who did it) or else gang-related, in which case the cops usually know who did it and just have to find the guy. Look at the two murders this month – they were pretty sure who’s likely to have done it, and their suspect has already been caught and is going to be charged on Thursday.

  I don’t think car theft is at the level it used to be either, but that’s probably more the improved technology than any increase in police diligence.

• Ephraim 20:39 on 2020-08-19 Permalink

  Kate, doesn’t matter if it’s murder, car theft, burglary, etc. The police are highly ineffective other than taking reports. And then I didn’t even touch on the fact that so much crime is unreported because businesses, like banks, don’t want their name listed with crime. The police don’t find stolen items (unless it by chance ends up at a pawn shop and even then the pawn shop makes you BUY it back, even though it’s yours and they received stolen property). They don’t do anything when you report your CC stolen. They don’t know how to follow computer crime, for the most part. They take reports, give out a few tickets, break up fights, tell you that your party is making too much noise, etc. Heck, when the break-in rate for cars was super-high, the didn’t even bother to put in bait cars (okay, Vancouver did). They just took reports. Oh and when they find drugs, they overvalue it, because big numbers impress us. They get prostitutes to move to a new street, because well… NIMBY. They get drug deals to move to a new street, because well… NIMBY.

  That’s exactly the point, the police don’t really solve crime, technology solves crime. In the case of car theft, the question is… who has an interest in lowering crime… the car manufacturers who sell a new car when a car is stolen? The garages and body shops that work on repairing a car? The insurance company, that makes a profit off of selling you insurance? Nope. Just the consumer, who wants their car NOT to be stolen. The British government was at the forefront of some of the changes to cars including more parts getting the VIN inscribed and the passenger side key disappearing. But I car could be encrypted to prevent it from being stolen. Imagine a 128-bit encryption key for each engine, no encryption key, even hot-wiring a car won’t work. There are 500 stolen cars in Canada each day. I’ve had one stolen. Police found it after it was burnt, to keep the police from being able to use forensics.

  A Tesla is can’t be stolen easily, it reports it’s location all the time, it reports it’s VIN when you go to a Supercharger. It basically becomes a problem when stolen, because you can’t put it on an official charger, you have to lock out it’s cell service and it’s updates, etc. It becomes a devalued orphan anywhere in the world.

• Kevin 23:16 on 2020-08-19 Permalink

  Ephraim
  I never expected them to be good at it. (The police tech stories I could tell you).
  I just figure if we have to have cops I’d rather them work on stolen property instead of killing people having a mental health crisis.

• Ephraim 17:33 on 2020-08-20 Permalink

  Kevin in both cases, a total waste of money. They aren’t trained to handle people in a mental health crisis, hence the need to move money towards social workers. They aren’t trained to handle the homeless, hence the need to move money into homeless shelters. And they don’t have a clue on how to stop bicycle theft. And the best function of the police is community outreach and being trusted by the community so that they could know what is going on, but they have militarized themselves and abused their powers so we don’t trust them. We should basically make the cars friendlier, their uniforms friendlier, ensure that they follow the laws as an example to us all and then people will trust them enough to tell them when they see bicycle theft, car theft, etc. The best results from policing actually happen when people trust and respect the police… something the Montreal police are VERY FAR from.