Story of a Stolen Bike

By Sutton R. Stokes, 10-14-08

	Caption: Have you seen this bike?

It was a pleasant evening in early fall as a Missoula resident named Julie left work on her bike.

Her husband was out of town, and a house guest from England was on his own recognizance, so Julie was in no hurry to head home. She pedaled toward Mt. Jumbo and spent a few hours on the trails before deciding to call it a day while there was still light for the ride back.

It was about nine p.m. by the time Julie reached her house, a craftsman bungalow on a quiet residential street in the University District. As she pedaled up the long, hedge-lined gravel driveway beside the house, past a bed of neatly trimmed shrubs, she noticed that the garage door was ajar.

“That was strange, but my only thought was just that I needed to close it,” she recalls. “I wasn’t even thinking yet that something might be missing.”

Julie and her husband are bike people and have accumulated a half dozen over the years. They store them in the garage, hanging from hooks screwed into two-by-fours along one wall.

Julie wheeled her bike through the open door, navigated her way around some standard-issue garage clutter she’d been putting off straightening up, and headed for the bike hooks to hang hers up.

That’s when something else struck her as odd. Over by the row of bikes on the wall, Julie noticed her husband’s helmet, which he normally kept hanging from his mountain bike, sitting on the floor.

Then she saw the gap in the row of bikes. Where there should have been four bikes hanging, there were only three. Her husband’s Specialized Stumpjumper Expert, a $2,500 purchase two years ago, was missing.

After double-checking with her husband the next morning to make sure he hadn’t brought his Specialized with him on his trip, Julie called the police. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but it wasn’t what she got.

“They just said I should come in and fill out a bike card,” says Julie, who was surprised that an officer wasn’t able to stop by, especially given the relatively high value of the stolen item.

That afternoon, she went down to the police station and filled out the card. The bike wasn’t registered with the city, but she knew the serial number and entered that on the card. She also brought along a picture of the bike and a written description. The police officer said he would staple all of this to the card.

Curious what happens next in cases like these, I contacted Officer Rob Scheben, the crime-prevention officer for the Missoula Police Department.

First, he addressed the question of why an officer didn’t stop by to take Julie’s report in person.

“The police work hard to gather any items of evidentiary value,” he says. “This is what solves a crime.”

Since there was no forced entry, and given that Julie had waited overnight before calling the police, the chances of finding any useful evidence were small.

“Most bike thefts are made up of a person walking into someone’s yard and riding away on an unsecured bike,” says Scheben, a scenario that usually generates no evidence at all. “Without something like a witness, video surveillance, or other suspect information from the victim, the investigation phase is over before it can really begin. The only next step is to enter the bike’s information into our system so we can hopefully start the recovery process.”

The “system” Scheben is referring to is a database called the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Police agencies nationwide have access to this database, which holds information on everything from dangerous fugitives to, in this case, stolen bikes.

Police enter information into NCIC, such as the description and serial number of Julie’s bike. But they can also use NCIC to determine whether recovered property is stolen, and where it was stolen from. If police in Spokane find Julie’s bike in the course of a raid — or for sale in a pawn shop — they will know to contact Missoula PD, who in turn will notify Julie.

How would police find the bike for sale in a pawnshop? In most cities, pawn shop owners are required to provide lists of pawned items to the police department so that these can be checked against theft reports. Here in Missoula, the municipal code requires these reports by noon on the day following the initial transaction, and requires that items not be sold until either police have given a green light, or 60 days passes, whichever comes first.

What about the rumour that, if you find your own bike in a pawn shop, you have to buy it back?

“As long as you can prove that the bike belongs to you, the victim of the theft does not have to buy back their own bike,” says Scheben. “But this means it is imperative that you report the theft when it occurs, so we can confirm it in our records that it is a stolen bike.”

Scheben was glad to hear that Julie knew her bike’s serial number.

“One of the biggest problems we have is that most of the time a bike theft victim is only able to give a minimal description of the bike,” says Scheben. “We need not only the make, model, color, etc. but the serial number as well. I encourage everyone to register their bike with the city as well as write down the serial number and keep it in a safe place.”

Without serial numbers, Scheben explains, even if police do recover a bike, they have no good way to determine ownership.

“Right now we have over 100 bikes in our storage area, and because we have no information on them, we can’t get them back to their owners.”

Of course, no matter how complete the information, it’s always possible for something to get lost in translation. When Julie checked the Missoulian police report feature the Sunday after the incident, she found the following description of her silver Specialized Stumpjumper.

“Special Zed Stump Jumper purple bike taken from residence.”

In the month since the crime, Julie and her husband haven’t heard anything further about the stolen bike. Julie’s husband bought a new bike, but now he keeps it in the basement instead of the garage.

Some people are tempted to try to quantify the relative impact of a theft like this. It’s just a bike, they might say. But that’s not the point. As anyone knows who has suffered a burglary or other theft from the home, the worst part is not the material loss, it’s the sense that your privacy and sense of security have been violated.

“At first I wasn’t thinking about that part of it, but as time passed it’s the feeling of intrusion that’s bothered me most of all,” Julie says. “Someone gets to walk up my driveway in broad daylight, try the doorknob, and just walk right in. It makes you feel unsafe.”

“It makes you not like where you’re living for a little while.”

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.