Hi all,
I've been reading here for a while but this is my first post. I have a question for you.
If someone posts that their bike has been stolen, and you find it, what do you do?
I actually had the thrill of finding a friend's stolen bike a month or so ago. My friend put this bike together in a very distinctive way - there's no other bike in the city, I'm certain, that could remotely be confused with it. So when I came across it cable-locked to a bike rack, my heart started racing. I called my friend but couldn't reach him. I called another friend who works at a nearby bike shop and borrowed a U-lock and secured it to the rack. Also called the police, but by the time they got there, my friend who owned the bike still hadn't gotten my message, so there wasn't much they could do without him.
At any rate, he has it back now, and I'm still a little giddy about the whole thing. Makes me kind of want to spend my spare time cruising around looking for stolen bikes. (This is mainly a fantasy. But then I like my fantasies to be as plausible as possible, otherwise I get distracted and start arguing with myself about technical details (yeah. I know it's sad. leave me alone. back to the bike question.) so I've started thinking about what I'd do if this happened again.)
The bike I found belonged to someone whose number I knew, so that made things pretty easy. I'm thinking about what I'd do if I saw a bike that had been posted as stolen here. (I don't know if you can post to the board by cell, but my cell phone is pretty basic - I don't think it even has web-viewing capacity.)
One option I guess would be to ride home and post, telling the owner where the bike is. That leaves lots of time for the thief (or buyer) to ride away though. I suppose I could put an extra lock on the bike (assuming it were very clearly the bike in question) with some sort of contact information or instructions to post on the forum if they feel it's been reclaimed in error. And the issue about whether or not to call the police was really tricky. Feelings about them vary wildly in the social circles I run in. Given that I could have been seen as someone randomly slapping a U-lock on someone else's bike, it felt like a safe precaution, but it could have been a mistake, depending on the feelings of the owner. I don't know. I guess I'd like to see some instructions or preferences in the "my bike was stolen" posts, or, short of that, hear some thoughts of people in the bike community.
Thanks!