Bike thief gets beat up (with video.)
So, what do you think of the depicted Street Justice in the vid? I think they delivered a surprisingly restrained amount of violence upon the thief. There are a lot of places where that guy would probably end up stabbed or worse.
Guy is obviously not a fan of Italian cinema.
That was comparatively restrained for a bunch of young guys catching a bike thief. I’m glad they didn’t really hurt him, and I hope he won’t do it again. He didn’t end up bloody at all, and what violence there was was only kicking and punching- no weapons or slamming him into the ground or a wall. I’m not a fan of vigilante justice, though.
Anyone who videotapes himself or his friends in the act of violence, or allows someone else to videotape it happening, is a fucking idiot. While I have zero respect for thieves of any kind and I think they should definitely get beaten up, hard, I also have no respect for guys who beat people up,** record it or allow it to be recorded, and then post it on the internet** - because it shows to me that they’re very stupid and opening themselves up to all sorts of legal trouble.
Provided the report of what happened is accurate, I have no problem with it. That’s just part of the cost of doing business as a bike thief.
What we saw was somwhat restrained, but according to the guy who claims to have filmed the beat down, that was only the second half. The guy could have been pummeled worse.
The one guy also threw a decent font snap kick to the guy’s midsection (although it didn’t look like it connected well), so he may be injured worse than he looks. It’ll take a few hours for the swelling and bruises to show how badly he’s hurt.
ETA: And I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the guy. He chose to take on a high-risk endeavor. Also, he should have dropped his own helmet, once they started yanking on it. To easy to grab and do serious damage to your neck, and provides too easy a way to grab you to impede a getaway.
At first I was like ‘What? A bike thief wearing a helmet?’ but of course, that’d only help him look more like a regular joe working on his bike (as the updated text below the video indicates). I’m so naive. Honestly, I was expecting a lot worse. Maybe it’s because it was broad daylight, maybe it’s because they had a camera, but there didn’t seem to be that much rage in ‘Don’t steal bikes, bro.’ But yeah, don’t condone violence, don’t tape your violence, etc. etc.
Well, that’s the end of the beating with the first half unfilmed, and near the end the guy does gets stomped in the back of his ribs and what looks like kicked or kneed so that his head bounces of a pillar of some kind (the actual connecting hit is off screen and it’s hard to tell if it connected with hs body or head). At the end he’s also standing wobbling with one hand on a door to steady himself, so he got hit in the head pretty hard.
There’s no blood or teeth getting spit out, but considering we didn’t get to see the first adrenalin-fueled half, I’m thinking the guy got a pretty big pounding.
My granny could have, and would have, whupped his ass much worse than that 'lil shoving match.
The guy should just thank his lucky stars that he didn’t really get his cock knocked in his watchpocket. Maybe he should look for a new line of work, or learn to run really fast.
Well. Videotaping it was stupid.
Beating people up is, generally, wrong. Should have held him for the cops.
…
On the other hand, on a personal and not especially ethical level, fucker deserved it and worse.
Doesn’t look like anyone curbstomped his hands, so he got away easy.
Recording and then releasing a film of assault has to be in its very own category of “incredibly dumb things to do”, especially legally.
Maybe the first half of the beating was more severe, but all I have to say about the second half is that payback’s a bitch.
Sometimes I think that society would be better off if people who are committing a crime run more of a risk of getting a smackdown. It seems that as things are now, criminals rarely get caught, and the punishment is usually not that onerous. My husband’s car was broken into, his new sound system was taken, and we had to pay quite a lot of money to fix the car back up. The thief was never caught (the cops didn’t even come out to take a report), and probably didn’t get much more than $50 for the sound system. It was just a smash and grab, but it cost us several thousand dollars to fix everything. Even if the thief had been caught by the police, his sentence would have been minimal. It wouldn’t have approached the amount of damage he did. Had my husband caught him, though…well, probably the thief would have had a few thousand dollars in medical bills.
I really think that society needs a little more in the way of payback. The wrongdoer should have to pay back the damage and losses he inflicted, at least twice.
Quoted for truth. If the guys in the video had just held the thief and called the police, the worst that would have happened to him was a few hours of inconvenience. The guy would have been out buying a new drill before the stores closed (some website has a photo of his thieving gear.)
Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be interesting if the guys who were stupid enough to video tape themselves ended up getting busted for mugging him and stealing his drill and bike tools?
There are criminal and civil laws that provide for this. The problem is that low-level street criminals tend to be poor. The legal system can transfer money from one person to another, but it can’t create money where it doesn’t exist.
Okay, then how about some eye-for-an-eye justice like, for every $100 that thief-boy costs me, I get to yank out one thief nose hair with tweezers?
They should have held him down and drilled him to death with the drill that he was using - right in his temple, blood, gore, murder.
We’re trying to have a goddamn society here, and these parasites are the reason that it doesn’t work. Time to die!
I 100% percent support justice and retribution being meted out by the intended victim at the time of the event. I don’t support letting some idiot film and post it, for the above-stated reason that it leaves the victim in a state of legal jeopardy.
I don’t condone it. I don’t support it. But I sure as heck understand it.
Yanking out nose hairs doesn’t hurt that much.
Then the thief can do community service to work it off, at something like fifty cents an hour. It’s not that I really want the money repaid to ME*, but that the thief should have to realize that the stuff he stole cost someone some real money, and that he’s responsible for making restitution somehow. He needs to learn that nothing is free, and stealing stuff WILL cause unpleasant consequences, like having to sweat to pay for whatever he’s stolen, and whatever he’s damaged.
I’d also like to see a much more accurate, and much higher, conviction rate on all crimes.
And a pony.
*Though I’d prefer it, of course.
I’m reminded of that Sesame Street song- “One of these things is not like the other…”