I don't think taking a photo will have any actionable follow-up—I have no way of following up to see if someone reports to see anyone has reported a stolen bike in the area—but might make a thief decide to go find a different target, while not being a major issue if you're the actual owner.
As a healthy, medium-large guy who's okay at de-escalation, I live in the assumption that no one will try to hurt me for interfering. I'll probably learn better one day.
Of course, it's quite possible that the Average Bike Thief in Amsterdam is a well-organized criminal-for-hire kind of person, doing surgical strikes against the most valuable bikes and so on (as is often the case with car theft, afaik). Then perhaps an angle grinder is just standard Day 1 equipment.
As ever, impossible to stop a determined thief, but starting to get "good enough".
I'd guess part of their motivation is to dissuade theft and resale of their bikes, which are quite distinctive. Though that might be attributing too much rationality to a bike thief.
Well police helped him recover the bike without arresting anyone and told him next time he should just steal it back and don't bother them.
For example, in Sweden, if it's been more than 24 hours, it's illegal to do it on your own.
The new "owner" will keep the bike as he has bought in in good faith. The shop will claim that it cannot check every used bike. The rightful owner could try to get money from the person who stole it (if found), but they most likely don't have any money.
It's the perfect crime and the reason why we cannot have nice bikes. People are literally sleeping with their expensive bikes in a room.
However as soon as you as the buyer feel something is off, you aren't protected anymore because only good faith buyers are protected. For example if you go to the black market or something seems to be extremely cheap you definitively aren't protected anymore.
It's a conflict of interests. This law is trying to do a tradeoff. Imagine you went to Walmart and bought a bike and everything seemed fine but it turned out that an employee stole the bike and sold it to you in the name of Walmart. In this case you can keep the bike.
No stolen bikes end up in shops, no siree. Yeah right.
Of course this depends on the police not being lazy which clearly is a big ask but if that is too much any law is pointless.
Calling cops and doing it with their help covers your ass.
During COVID there were plenty of officers available to fine normal people who were sitting too close on a bench. But to deal with real criminals who talk back is too much of a hassle.
This brings up an interesting legal question.
Is it illegal to steal back your own property? Even if you trespass onto private property to do so, the person would have to get the Police involved to do anything about that, at which time you can say "Sure, I'll take the trespassing charge, and while we're here I'm leaving with all of my property".
Strangely there are jurisdictions where if your stuff is in a pawn shop and the pawnbroker claims he didn't know it was stolen, he might have the legal right to recoup what he paid for it from you!
Donuts are now over $14/dozen each where I live. Another casualty of inflation I guess.
Our police had a policy of not attending house burglaries with odd street numbers to cut their required response rate in half. I can't imagine them even answering the phone over a bike.
The only reason i would call the police is to get a reference number for an insurance claim.
I had a bicycle stolen, and after filing the report the police phoned me to ask for more details on the lock I'd used.
I later found it on Gumtree, with a description ending something like "Call Peter on 07123456789, meet at Forest Heath Station". Putting the mobile phone number into Gumtree's search brought up about 50 bicycles, "Call John" "Call Dave" etc. I emailed this to the police, and had another phone call thanking me for my incredible investigation skill.
They said they would go to find Peter/John/Dave, but would only contact me again if they found my bike, which they did not.
I'm very suspicious of accounts like [2] "Mr T" with "Cash only" and a huge selection of bicycles.
[1] https://www.bikeregister.com/news/putting-a-value-on-protect...
[2] https://www.gumtree.com/profile/accounts/48e9b2ff00d3f04e27f... or similarly https://www.gumtree.com/profile/accounts/b8b756750f2960d115b...
Counter-Terrorism Patrol Unit.
IME speculation: for security-adjacent personnel, recovery efforts (equipment, fraud, etc.) are a great way to quantify the work you do when you don't otherwise generate revenue. You can't take credit for disrupting events that didn't happen [because you intervened], but nobody can argue with you recovering or clawing back $x in lost/stolen assets.
They were probably tasked with patrolling for misplaced explosives and other drama, but since incident count is low, they were given supplementary tasks (like tagging bikes they come across on patrol) to justify their salary and foster positive PR.
Driving a bicycle while intoxicated is also treated just like driving a car.
Electric bikes going 25km an hour or faster, or have larger than a 250watt battery needs to be registered as a motor vehicle. You’ll need a driver’s license, insurance, etc.
You might need to do something else though - e.g. trespass or cut someone else's lock etc. You are on my shaky ground then I think.
It is a little different but on one occasion, in France, some guy sold a computer online, sent it, and never got paid. Pissed off, he broke in the crook house and took back his computer (plus a few other things, not smart...), they both sued each other, the crook ended up in prison for 2 months, and the one who broke into his house had 4 months suspended sentence. But even if he just took back his computer, he would still be guilty, but the judge would most likely have handed out a lighter sentence.
* You pay $400 for 3 years of coverage. * Must have the bike locked and file a police report. * They can choose whether or not to attempt recovery. * If they choose not to, or fail to recover the bike, they'll replace it. * Up to 3 replacements are covered in the 3 years.
So it's really just theft insurance but they can attempt to recover low-hanging fruit. In wonder what their attempted recovery rate is.
It really worked unexpectedly well, I've heard a lot of skepticism and I don't know how things are at VanMoof but if the will is there it really works
The VanMoof or Tweakers forums are filled with users talking about the repairs the did this week to their bike, or that they send their bike back since it broke the week they bought it.
The problem is that Dutch police are a narco-state dysfunctional hellhole. They don't do anything that goes after organized crime... they even cut the team dealing with the gangs behind ATM explosions in Germany [1].
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/geldautomaten-sprengung...
I am sure the bike hunters exist but it wouldn’t surprise me if much of their work is PR.
They used to produce monthly videos of bike recovery operations, though it looks like they've stopped the videos so you'll have to scroll past a few years of promo videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vanmoof
Often they recover the bike from a yard / homeless camp / shop with 100s of other non-VanMoof bikes they leave behind. It would be so easy to crack down on organised bike theft. The financial, social, and environmental costs of securing bikes and recovering from a theft is huge.