Fight Bicycle Theft With the Open Source Bike Registry 135
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "No one wants to buy a stolen bike, but if you see a bike you're interested in on Craigslist or at a flea market, there isn't a good way to know if it's stolen. Now Kickstarter has an interesting project that is looking for funding to expand a searchable database that will help users protect their bikes by permanently saving the bike's serial number. 'We regularly saw people trying to sell stolen bikes, and would search for the bikes online — but it was too difficult to find definitive information about them because too few people save their serial numbers,' says Seth Herr, founder of the Bike Index and lead developer of the project. Herr envisions Bike Index as a way to solve the 'awareness problem' — awareness of existing registries and of a bike's identifying information. 'A common problem when people get their bikes stolen is that it's like the first time the owner thinks about "What was my serial number?" and other details that are important in recovering a stolen bike,' says Marcus Moore. If every bike shop integrated Bike Index registration at the point of sale, that would make it easy for victims of bike theft to accurately report a stolen bike, and for bike purchasers to verify that they aren't buying stolen goods. The Project plans to collaborate with Bryan Hance, the founder of stolenbikeregistry.com, one of the Internet's first-ever registries to track stolen bikes, which already has almost 20,000 bicycles in its registry."
This is retarded (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If the number's filed off... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because the serial numbers and mandatory registrations have done so well to stop automotive theft.
They help a lot when a cop sees the car in question in between wherever it was stolen from, and the chop shop it's going to. Most importantly, it helps distinguish the stolen red Honda Civic from all of the legitimately owned red Honda Civics in the area, so the cops don't spend time chasing after the wrong car.
The reason cops don't go heavily after bike theft is that it's a relatively petty crime: A $200 theft is a very different animal from a $20,000 theft. I just wish that they spent an appropriate level of effort on those $20,000,000 thefts out there.
Re:UK already has this (Score:2, Insightful)
When I was a kid I remember they also had a similar bike registration drive. This was in the US though. It's clearly not new. What might be new is a central registration system that encompasses the world over. One of the problems that exist in the eastern United States or did was that gangs would drive around the suburbs picking up kids bikes and then exporting container loads of bikes to the third world for resale. It actuality its probably going to have little to no impact on bike theft.
What would probably have an impact is if we did more to avert career criminals. As it is our system is the reason for most crime. Rather than help rehabilitate criminals we crucify them and make it impossible to hold down real jobs when released from prison. Is essence we force a life of crime and poverty on them. It's only the brighter criminals and those with money/connections whom have a real chance of escaping this. And those handful of examples are not evidence that are system is just or working.