I love the idea of police departments leaving cars and bikes on the streets, unlocked or locked poorly, with hidden GPS systems to lead the police to the thieves’ lairs (where other stolen property may well be located), but some ACLU types are screaming “entrapment” and “Lazy police work.”
As a two-time victim (beater bikes not worth much, about $200 to replace), I think it’s great. Even if the thieves are able to beat the rap by claiming entrapment, they’ll still lose the bikes, cars, etc. and more important they’ll need to reconsider stealing easy-pickins vehicles in the future.
I don’t much care about the lazy policework argument–what, we’re supposed to reject low-cost, low-manpower techniques when the police say they don’t have the bucks or the butts to spend on looking for stolen vehicles? What really pisses me off is that, about a block from where my last bike was stolen (chained to a STOP sign with a heavy-duty lock, a block from a very busy subway station, on a main road) some guy’s been running a “garage sale” for the last few years, at which his principal item is bicycles. This guy just happens to have a few dozen used bikes in his garage at all times? Give me a break.
Lawful people don’t steal bikes or cars, even if they are “easy pickings.” I’m all for it - it seems to me to be no more entrapment than a fake drug dealer.
First off, no, I don’t think it’s entrapment at all (from the POV of someone with no legal background whatsoever). If you steal a bike, you steal a bike, end of story.
Second, I know you said “ACLU Type” but from what I can tell, this has nothing to do with the ACLU. It’s an article from the UK and the people screaming entrapment seem to be referred to only as “the contrasting view”. Their argument is “There is so much else they can do to prevent bike theft that doesn’t involve leaving temptation in the way of drug addicts that we have spent months helping to get clean.” I don’t think the ACLU would go quite this far.
Another person said…after spending a night drinking and then getting caught stealing a bike “I think that this is a honeypot trap of the most wasteful kind, and should not be a method of catching the gangs of bike thieves that doubtless exist - it’s striking at the bottom rung of the ladder, and this always proves ineffective.”
Sorry. When you have a neighborhood with a high rate of type of crime which is almost impossible to recover the stolen goods (or so I’ve heard) I think this is a great idea. I also don’t feel it’s entrapment since you could just, ya know, not steal the bike.
Yeah, that link is to a British newspaper, so the ACLU isn’t applicable, but that’s where the entrapment argument comes from, and I can see it as being valid in some situations.
It’s not entrapment unless there’s a cop around, trying to trick or goad people into taking it.
I see no reason why it wouldn’t be - you have proof that stolen property is being stored in the house, and you will be able to prove that at least one item was stolen once you’re in there.
I don’t really see much of a problem with it. Especially with bikes because otherwise there is almost zero chance of getting caught, which makes bike theft near-epidemic in places. There’s a bike shop in Laramie that sells a bumper sticker that says “They still hang bike thieves in Wyoming” that always struck me as appropriate, since the reason why they hung horse thieves in the old west is because your chances of getting caught stealing a horse were very low, so the punishment had to be severe. It’s the same thing for bikes, and since we can’t hang 'em I guess catching more of them with bait bikes will have to do.
I could see more of a wasting resources argument for cars though. For one, the bait cars themselves and all the fancy tracking/car disabling stuff they have doesn’t come cheap, and plus I’d imagine they get a lot more dud nights since even in bad areas car theft is fairly rare. Car thieves also get caught all the time either in the act or driving around stolen cars. It’s not like bike theft where bait bikes are virtually the only way to combat it. So I could see the argument made that it might be more productive for the cops to spend that time and money doing traditional police work like going after the fence apparatuses and trying to actually recover cars.
Another problem I could see with the bait car approach is that it might not actually catch real professional car thieves. Usually the bait cars are left with the keys in the ignition (since the cops would be waiting a very long time if they didn’t). This means it’s a lot more likely to catch some generic criminal type who swipes the car as a target of opportunity. For a real professional with a flatbed truck or the know-how to hotwire a newer car, the keys in the ignition are not quite as appealing, not to mention an obvious set up in areas where bait cars are being used. If the TruTV show is any indication, it certainly doesn’t look like they’re dragging in a particularly high caliber of criminal.
I also agree with Joey P re: the ACLU and the invented outrage on your part. Looking up ACLU and Bait Car in google shows a lot of people claiming “ACLU-types” are against them, but I don’t see a single instance of the ACLU actually opposing bait cars. They’ve opposed some other more questionable honey-pot type stings, but I think it’s pretty hard to make the entrapment argument here.
Okay–I’m with you and JoeyP on the ACLU thing, though that’s the only counter-argument I can see (or invent). So why don’t more police departments do a program like this routinely? Seems to me a few years of such a program would make the concept of “bike theft” obsolete.
I’m not up for trying to track down the costs of this at the moment, but I’d wager it’s not all that costly. I don’t believe the GPS equipment is all that expensive…hell, they could just leave an iPhone* under the seat and that would do the trick. As for the car, they impound and scrap cars all the time, so I’m sure they could use one of those ones. And as for the dud nights…who cares? It doesn’t cost anything to just leave it sitting around all night. At most they just have to go and move it from one neighborhood to the next every 7 or 8 hours.
And since it’s a bait car, it’s not like an officer has to sit an monitor it for hours on end, they just have to notice that it’s gone and then find out where it is. I’m sure whatever GPS system they use could alert someone to that automatically.
*I’m not saying that they would use an iPhone, I’m just saying that if an iPhone can do it, I’m sure they can come up with a way to do it that would cost something on the order of a few hundred dollars as opposed to several thousand.
ETA, WRT cost, this is effectively what OnStar does, and that doesn’t seem to cost to much.
a few years ago the poliice in Amsterdam used undercover officers dressed as orthodox Jews or Gay tourists to stop anti-semitic or anti-gay violence from happening
Lok-homo or Decoy-gay was nominated as new word of the year 2007
Its not literal entrapment, but that seems a lot sketchier then the bike thing. A backpack left on a street corner is usually there because someone lost it. A bike is usually left on a street corner because someones coming back for it so they can bike home. I don’t have any problem with the case of the bikes, when you grab a bike thats left somewhere, even if its not locked up, your pretty obviously steeling.
That person is an idiot. Professional thieves may be at the bottom rung, but they’re not stealing items to build up their personal collections - the intent is to sell the stolen item to a fence, who may be be the clearing-house for multiple professional thieves and be dealing with even higher-level fences…
How does this imbecile think ladders are climbed? If the fences are removed, so is the profit motive for the “gangs of bike thieves”. And if he personally is just some stupid fucking drunk who decided to steal for a lark, then I’m okay with giving him five lashes in the public square and sending him on his way.
That makes sense. I was trying to figure out why I had more of a problem with the back pack then the bike and that’s it. For that same reason, it would be like leaving a wallet with a hundred dollar bill hanging out of it on a crowded bus. Most likely, the person who left it there isn’t coming back for it or at the very least didn’t leave it there on purpose. But like you said, with a bike (or car), you left it there with the specific intention of coming back to it later, and more then that, the thief knows you were planning to come back to it*, it’s not like they could claim that they thought it was a lost or abandoned bike.
*Come to think of it, the other difference is that you’re supposed to leave you’re bike (or car) out by the street. You’re backpack filled with $2500 worth of stuff…not supposed to be left out on the sidewalk.
I thought that guy was kind of funny. His seemed to think that this entire system should be thrown out because he got caught. This is where I like to turn these things around and suggest that if instead of getting caught, this system recovered his stolen bike, he’d probably be pretty happy about it.
I agree. That’s the sort of thing people might pick up to take to a lost and found or police station. I could even see someone rifling through it to try to find an ID or contact information for its owner.
Agreed as well- I don’t think the two situations are comparable.
If I see a backpack lying on the ground with nobody nearby, I’m going to pick it up to see who it belongs to- if there’s no ID in it, how am I going to find the owner short of putting up signs and hoping someone sees them? Any effort I put into getting the bag back to someone could, in this situation, lead to me getting arrested for “theft”.
If I see a car or a bike sitting around, even unlocked, I’m not going to assume that someone lost it.
I think the ACLU was right in objecting to the APD’s actions.