Beyond just noting the trend of growing bike theft, this article had some interesting tactics that are being employed to fight bike theft, including the use of social media by police departments, "bait bikes" with radio transmitters, etc. As someone who got his stolen bike back thanks largely to this message board, it certainly struck a chord with me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/us/27bikes.html?hpw
Interesting article indeed.
One thing that I did find weird is how in Boston, their social media outreach has only recovered at most three bikes out of 238.
I think some type of network alert here that a user could follow on twitter, facebook, or via email would do loads in recovering even more stolen bikes in the pgh area.
Yeah, it makes you wonder if Boston's social media outreach isn't reaching the right people. When my bike was stolen about a month ago, I remember the police being relatively responsive but largely irrelevant to the action happening through this message board, on FaceBook, on Craigslist, etc. That article also made me wonder if police paying more attention to bike theft could also help in a broken windows kind of way, in which following a smaller crime of bike theft (a description which is certainly relative) helping to resolve larger issues of crime.
