Hot Wheels

Ever had a bicycle stolen? Join the club. Bike theft is epidemic, and a whole micro-economy is built on it

By Chris Smith

THERE ARE NO BICYCLE THIEVES in Vancouver. Pawnshops buy only from legit owners, and report suspicious activity to the police. Every sidewalk hustler asking 10 bucks for a custom-built racing bike found it in the alley. The overweight, mid-forties pot-smoker has a pink Huffy with a flowered basket—“Amanda” inscribed in dainty cursive script—because a friend gave it to him.

When the RCMP approved my request to ride along during a bait-bike sting, I was overjoyed. For five months I’d tried to pin down a bicycle thief to interview, and for five months they’d eluded me. I felt like a toothless bear wading through a stream of slippery salmon—they were all around me, but none of them would let me get a grip. A sting was the perfect answer, to catch them in the act, to move past the worthless denials and get one person, caught red-handed, to admit that he, or she, was a bicycle thief. As we climbed into the surveillance car, I wondered aloud how long it would take before someone took the bait. “Well,” the officer said, “we’ve never actually caught anyone.”

This is the candy-coated world of the bicycle thief, a sugarplum fairytale in which the object of theft is also the means of getaway, the property can be unloaded before anyone knows it’s gone, and the victim—aware that the recovery rate of stolen bikes is almost zero—often doesn’t bother reporting the crime. The manpower and expense required to catch a single bandit is too exorbitant to justify the investment, so bait-bike stings function more as deterrents than as viable means of prosecution. Last year, 1,497 bikes were reported stolen in the Vancouver area—four a day—up more than 20 percent from 2005. Whether more bikes are being stolen or more thefts are being reported is anyone’s guess, but bike theft is reaching epidemic proportions in Vancouver, and both the virus and the cure always seem just out of reach.

Today Susan has fresh dish towels in her shopping cart—not unusual at Sears or the Bay, but odd on an East Hastings sidewalk. Her bulky, orange Home Depot cart—the muscle car of homeless carriages—is usually filled with old clothes, lamps and lumpy garbage bags. Occasionally a bike materializes alongside the plywood construction wall Susan stakes out to peddle her goods. Unlike many of her peers, who mill about in front of the recycling centre next door, she’s a passive saleswoman, waiting for eyes to drift in her direction before leaning on the handlebars and asking, as if it is standard banter, “Bike?”

It is useless to press her for details. “No, I just found it,” she says. “Forty. It’s a good bike, forty.” She’ll take half that, of course, and within days will “just find” another. Stolen and abandoned bicycles wind their way around the neighborhood like chips at a poker table, changing hands with every play. Junkies needing quick cash for a fix will snatch an unsecured bike from a yard or hallway, or snip through a cable lock with bolt cutters concealed beneath a puffy coat. They sell the bike for five dollars to a slightly more patient friend, who sells it to a street vendor or pawnshop for twice that. In a matter of hours, the bike goes from its original owner—through a series of middlemen—to a new one, a grey-market buyer who is probably replacing his own stolen bike.

The initial theft is often fuelled by drugs, according to Tim Fanning of the Vancouver Police Department. Bikes are practically a currency, he says, bouncing “from crackhead to crackhead,” quickly landing in a pawn shop or the hands of someone like Susan, who redistributes them back into the consumer population. Approximately 80 percent of property crime in Vancouver is linked to the drug trade, which in turn has close ties to other crimes like prostitution. Though the bikes originate in handlebar-thick locations like the Kits pool, Granville Island and UBC, they regularly wind up on the sidewalks of East Hastings, where—intact or stripped for parts—they are traded several times before finding new homes.

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