Find out your local bike theft crime statistics with Bikmo's Bike Theft Map. Compare your local bicycle theft rates by month or year to other UK areas.
Did you build this? If so I think you could do with giving us some context. Where is the data from? Why does it look like there are virtually no bike thefts in Scotland? What does this do other than show where large groups of people (and their bikes) live?
Sorry for the late reply, the website uses data extracted from https://data.police.uk/data/ and organized in areas using the coordinate polygons. Yes it's clear that more populated areas will have a higher raw theft count but the app shows also rate of thefts per 100k as a better measurement.
It knows where your bike is at all times. It would be cool if one could use the ratio of where people park compared to how often something is stolen from there or something. Like, is it really an unsafe spot or just a popular one? Or is it really a safe spot, or a really unsafe one therefore almost no one uses it any more.
Clearly the place to own a bike is Edinburgh, where there are no bike thefts whatsoever. I pity the three people in Scotland who had their bike stolen, in Armadale, Clydebank and Glasgow.
I never had a bike stolen in Edinburgh even after using cycling as my main means of transport for many years. However, I did once have one completely stripped of components from right outside my flat - just leaving the frame securely locked to the wall.
I'm unsure what I'm supposed to be seeing here. I zoom in to London, there's plenty of green-ish.
I can click a borough, it alone becomes green-ish. I click another, that becomes purple. I have no indication what these colors are supposed to be or if something is supposed to happen?
This isn't showing anything to me from what I can see. Just a blank black map when I zoom in enough. At slightly lower zoom levels I can see outlines of cities and towns.
Is the idea that those are places where bikes are stolen? If so, isn't this just going to highlight towns and cities because that's lots of bikes are (particularly somewhere like Cambridge where there are loads of bikes), and wouldn't it be better to do per-capita bike thefts? Otherwise this is just a map of where bikes are, rather than where it's more or less dangerous to leave your bike unattended.
Edit: Actually, thefts per bike per capita. Just per capita doesn't take out the fact that there are some places with loads more bikes, like Cambridge. That's presuming the idea is to show where it's most likely that your bike will get stolen.
It took a little while for the map data to compute. Looking at the network graph, it had finished downloading the website after a second or so, but it took like 10 seconds for the initial bike theft data layer to show up, and about 50 seconds until the heat-map layer showed.
edit: Looks like it loads the outer level heat map data first, then the next level, etc. However, zooming in at this point breaks the site and turns it white. (This is on FF(87)). National Average widget also fails to load on FF, but works on Chrome, same goes for the zoom-in-page-turns-white-bug.
Bike theft is an underrated crime politically. Here in Denmark politicians are busy kicking out refugees, imposing tough sentences on gang related crime or demanding action against the crime of the week, as reported by the newspapers. All done so that Danes can feel safe in their own city.
That's bullshit, want to make Danes feel safe? Actually do something about crime that affect normal people, like bike theft. Most people don't notice gangs and aren't affected by it, but I'd bet that most adult Dane have had a bike or two stolen.
It truly is, theft in general. I moved to Denmark expecting it to be as safe as Germany only to have my backpack stolen while I was eating. Of course the police can't do anything about it, because why would they, they're busy raiding Christiania. At work 2 of my colleagues had their bikes stolen and mine looks deliberately beat up so it doesn't attract attention.
Oh yes, refugees. Never had a single problem with them. A nice Syrian restaurant would actually be on my wishlist.
tbh what could they do about it ? They can't really go full NCIS over a stolen backpack. There are thousands of "minor" thefts, and other small crimes/offences, every day in big cities, they'd need thousands of people to review videos, look for potential witnesses, follow the trail, &c.
That isn’t the broken windows theory. They are saying that people that steal a backpack are likely people that often steal backpacks, so arresting and prosecuting them helps to prevent their individual future crimes. The broken window theory is that visible signs of petty/minor crime and disorder encourage other people to commit additional (and more serious crime) that they would not have committed.
So the broken windows theory would say that seeing graffiti and panhandling would signal to other people that the area had a more general sense of lawlessness, that criminality was more normalized, and that if they commits crimes they would likely not be punished. However, the broken windows theory has been pretty soundly debunked and leads to tons of discriminatory targeting. [1][2]
Nobody is arguing that we don't want to catch those people, what people are saying is that it's impractical to catch them. Unless you've got a cop on the corner who catches him in the act, by the time the guy gets around the corner he's in the clear, and short of a surveillance state with face recognition cameras and heavy regulation on re-selling electronics, there's not much that can be done.
The problem, at least in the US, is what we consider a "serious crime". I don't care about people smoking pot, growing pot, or selling pot. I don't particularly care about people speeding on the highway. I do care a lot about murder, rape, fraud, and theft. These crimes have a massive deleterious impact on social stability and quality of life in my community and have direct (sometimes deadly) consequences for the victims.
I don't know much about the relative importance. But here in Norway lots of bike thefts are from professionals. Someone broke into our apartment complex last year and emptied all valuable bikes into a van and shipped off. So this is organized crime but sadly still swept under the rug by the police. The police here is in general very anti-bike and pro-car, so not surprised they don't care that much.
When parking outside when commuting and stuff, it's mostly homeless people nicking a wheel or a seatpost or bike lights. Still annoying and somewhat expensive, but I can understand that this type of crime is hard to do something about / investigate. But it could be "solved" by helping those in these situations better so they don't feel the need to do these petty-crimes (prevention rather than punishment).
Point is that it's organized, not just opportunistic. It's people breaking in, stealing and then having a network to distribute and sell the bikes without getting caught.
I worked at a company, an office in the middle of Copenhagen, in the middle of day a truck pulled up to the bike rack and maybe five guy just loaded the whole thing in the back of the truck. No reason to deal with locks or chains. Nope just stole the entire rack in one swoop.
Best one of these I've seen (security video of) is some thieves renting/stealing (don't know which) a flatbed truck with a grabbing arm thing. They just lifted the whole bike rack which everyone locks their bikes into onto the flatbed and drove away. Obviously well planned.
In the Netherlands, the police will put out "trap" bikes, and wait for you to buy it from a homeless person. Then they'll swoop down on you and charge you with something like conversion.
I mean second hand bicycles are a big market in the Netherlands, what kind of checks should you go through to make sure a private bicycle seller is legitimate.
I mean if you are buying a banged up 'stationfiets' just to commute is there really a way to know?
Also, knowing that a bike should have an ID or a working tracer chip and seeing it missing is enough of a reason not to buy it, or knowing that if you buy it anyway you're on the hook for it.
I don't think that's legal in Denmark. The police aren't allow to set traps that would make you break the law. Maybe it would accepted, because you where going to buy a stolen bike anyway... I'm not sure.
Mostly I think bikes stolen in Denmark end up in Eastern Europe anyway.
I doubt there's any place in the world that considers a simple bait bike as anything like entrapment. The police haven't done anything to even tempt you to break the law, and actual entrapment would require that they actively coerced you to break the law when you otherwise wouldn't.
Unless you mean the 'buying from a homeless person' part. Receiving stolen goods, would probably come down to if the jury or judge believed your claims that you had every reason to expect that the homeless guy really did own a $3K bike they wanted to sell.
Not as far as I know - they maybe do this using other methods. But they're trying to remove the market of people buying them, therefore reducing the motivation to steal them.
> are busy kicking out refugees, imposing tough sentences on gang related crime or demanding action against the crime of the week
So in your opinion they should invest more in petty crimes rather than serious crimes?
Sure but could you come up with an example in which organized crime from gangs (theft, robbery, gun and knife violence, drugs, etc.) are less serious than bike theft?
Any of those as discrete events would be less serious than distributed commonplace bike thefts. If your region gets such a reputation for petty crime that anyone has a thread of nervousness that they'll be victims when visiting, it's not going to be great for anyone.
If you ignore all the harm and violence caused by drug traffickers to get the drugs, from production to distribution in their final destination, I guess you can pretend it's just an harmless transaction between consenting adults.
Where I live (not the US) most recreational drug production, sale, and consumption is legal or at least ignored. However, things like cannabis oil is illegal and not ignored. It’s ridiculous.
Two gangs fighting over territory is what have caused civilians to be caught in the crossfire as long as gangs have existed. One risk civilians getting killed, the other risk you have to pay some of the money for a new bike (because it is insured I hope).
I do see your point and,.. sort of yes. It's not like there where no effort made against serious crime before. All new funding is directed at serious crime, and away from the petty stuff.
If you're goal is to make people feel safer, then you need to target the petty stuff that people actually experience. Also, much of the petty stuff is only petty because the police view it in isolation. Yeah, so what if my bike is stolen, insurance will deal with that. It's just that when they do catch a bike thief, then it often turns out that the same person stole 200 other bikes. Stealing a 3000DKK bike isn't worth the effort, but it's 50.000 bikes a year, that's an insane amount of money, given that almost no bike is ever returned.
I don't care if people on Christiania smokes or sell weed, and nor does most other people. Sure people should not experience gun violence, even in ghetto areas, but you can't direct all policing towards a few specific types of crime. It won't make people feel any safer.
> If you're goal is to make people feel safer, then you need to target the petty stuff that people actually experience.
Idk, if I had anti-tank missiles used in my region (like with the Nordic Biker Wars in the 90ies) or hand grenades like in Sweden more recently, I'd feel a lot less safe than if that doesn't happen but bikes are stolen more frequently. People tend to care more about getting shot, stabbed or blown up than about their transportation being stolen. Policies reflect that, imho with good reason.
It's obvious that you can't direct 100% of the police's resources to one specific area, but the reason why some people might feel they are not affected by serious crime, or organized crime, is because the consequences of these types of crime are quite serious and therefore should be prevented.
It's like saying you don't need a vaccine because you never get sick. Yeah there's a reason for that.
So yes, the police should focus more on human and drug traffic than bike theft.
Police these days is more like a private army of big corporations. They "fight" gangs because they provide products that compete with pharmaceutical companies and also give justification for racist politicians to use force against minorities. The same goes for attacking refugees.
Racism and corporate profits are embedded in politics and that needs to go.
Tackling real crime does not bring profits under the table and does not bring satisfaction to those politicians.
Gangs at least here tend to keep it low profile and to themselves. General public only knows there is a gang activity going on from newspapers. Only real problem is that they recruit new people in schools and that is a huge problem for parents, but that does not seem to bother the police.
This whole thing is self-inflicted as government created this huge unregulated and untaxed market and it is attractive especially for young people - in their mind this is their only chance at achieving some wealth.
If police really bothered about the issue, they would look why gangs exist at all and why politicians created such environment for them to thrive and may be look into all corruption that is going on.
Tackling gangs as it is currently done is a fool's errand.
It's not possible to remove gangs while an incentive of huge unregulated and untaxed market exist. So committing police to that is like trying to fill buckets under a leaking pipe, instead of just cutting off water and fixing it.
Yeah, let's just regulate and tax the market for stolen bikes. What do we do with people who don't follow the regulation and don't pay the taxes? Obviously we can't use the police, that'd be like trying to fill buckets under a leaking pipe.
I wanted to say that police focuses on gangs rather than tackling thieves and recovering bikes. But more important would be to change the law so that bike theft is not profitable. For example if someone made X on selling such bikes, they should get custodial sentence so that if you spread X over the years of sentence it will be lower than minimum wage.
Denmark isn't the US. The "minorities" you are talking about in those so-called gangs are as Danish as they come. Most gang members in Denmark are in motorcycle gangs like Hells angles and it not like the rest are made up of foreigners and minorities only either. There's approximately 1200 gang members in all of Denmark:
The numbers in the link is about gangs involved in crimes. The local motorcycle club isn't represented unless it's part of organized crime. It makes no difference to the civilians killed in crossfire if the gang has one or twenty members.
So your bike was stolen. Will that really affect your life? You need to spend 500 DKK on a new one.
Someone threatens you with force: That will affect you. Even if nothing happened physically. You wish you can get rid of that experience for 50.000 DKK for the rest of your life.
Aah see that's the point isn't it. In order to deal with the larger stuff, police has been complete removed from the streets of most cities. If you're physically attacked, in Denmark, the police won't be anywhere near you.
Most likely, yes, they will find the people who attacked you, but you where still attacked.
Bike theft on the surface is also one of the easiest crimes to catch thieves.
Simply buy a fleet of bikes, fit trackers and motion alarms to each, somewhere hard to detect like inside the tyres, then park them around the city secured by shitty locks in areas covered by CCTV, and then as soon as any bike moves more than a few feet, go arrest the person moving it.
Considering in a city of 10 Million people, there are probably only 100 who actively walk around with bolt cutters, it should be a simple case of finding every thief.
Once you've found the thieves, the harder task is making them stop stealing bikes. Encourage courts to hand out "get drug free or go to prison" sentences. Offer new identities in new cities to people who have picked friends they regret...
The last time I had a bike stolen, it was right under a CCTV camera from the company I was working at. The security people told me there was nothing they could do. The tools are in place, but there's absolutely no desire to use them. The same thing happens with people stealing packages off doorsteps. When I was still on Facebook, there were regular shares in the local groups of pictures of the thieves taking boxes from people's Ring doorbells or equivalent, followed by complaints about the police department having no interest in following up about the crime.
It turns out that improving the economic situation for people in an area leads to less crime. Weird how that works. Its almost like there is a whole class of crime that comes from real and perceived lack of opportunity.
Anyone with the initiative to steal bikes or catalytic converters also has the initiative to do something productive.
But everything else with an equally low bar to entry is much crappier. Stealing bikes and cats you get to be your own boss. Doing manual labor you have to show up on time, not do drugs on the job. Working for the gig economy crap you have to please some of the worst of the general public and a black box algorithm. Sure you can try run scrap, do odd jobs or part out cars but if you do either of those enough to make "stealing stuff" levels of money the government will be up your ass the same way they would be if you were stealing cats and bikes.
These people aren't desperate. They're assessing their options for making a buck and it's no surprise that the "I don't car what other people think" subset chooses petty crime. They need better options for making a buck. Not stuff that alleviates the need to make a buck. Most people willing to incur the risks involved stealing stuff have enough initiative and work ethic they're not gonna sit at home and smoke pot all day if the government gives them a handout.
This approach has successfully been used against car thieves, but it’s controversial (rightly or not, some people consider it entrapment) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car
Something like Lojack but for bikes would be another way to go, if a city would commit to pursuing thefts of bikes with GPS trackers (with the additional incentive that it would likely lead to more recoveries).
> Simply buy a fleet of bikes, fit trackers and motion alarms to each
Do that - and you'll be accused in "using the police to disproportionally punish the poor instead of working on the crimes that actually matter and helping the communities to get out of the vicious poverty cycle"
Sarcasm aside, this has some rationale: say you caught a bike thief. What you gonna do next? Fine him? He likely has no money. Put him into prison? Will cause more problems down the road.
Whipping his ass in Trafalgar Square would be a good option, but is highly unlikely to ever happen...
it's not about the petty little thieves, it's about the fences and big fish. you want the warehouses full of bikes and parts. the bikes aren't worth much to the thieves if they can't sell them easily.
Much more important would be to find who they are selling these bikes to. The thieves would not be stealing the bikes if someone was not buying them up in huge numbers.
so where can i find those £50 carbon road bikes you are speaking of? no dodgy guy on my corner and classifieds are maybe 20% off the new price for an 8 year old bike "because i never rode it anyway".
i sometimes dream about eastern european villages where everyone rides superlight fullies and aero racers.
Nobody here in Finland is buying bikes (or anything for that matter) from a dodgy guy on the street corner. They are usually sold online or if more organized operation forwards to some fence who ships them to another city (or country within the EU) to be sold. Depending on the bike they can also be sold as parts. Selling really expensive racing bike can be hard but selling the frame on its own after cleaning it is not that hard.
And if you are buying a 1000€ bike for 50€ you can be pretty sure it is stolen and buying stolen goods is illegal and can get you in trouble (if the police would actually be doing anything about bike theft...)
I've seen it countless times in Italy, people don't even bother buying an expensive bike, they just buy some half broken bike (usually from the same dodgy guys in the streets who steal them) because they know they will get stolen.
The police doesn't even bother fighting it, they often talk to many of the immigrants and rarely do something. I know because, as a second generation immigrant from Africa, the police was always stopping me just to talk.
It's kind of like bike sharing, you pay 20 euros until the next time they steal it from you.
On the plus side, it's giving a livelihood to poor and desperate immigrants who can't find a job in the sad Italian economy.
If it wasn't for bike theft and drug dealing, things would probably escalate to worse crimes.
Often the pattern is they get stolen by random dudes, who then pawn it off to the local bike fence gang, who then ship it far far away and either sell the parts or the bikes somewhere else. If you dont recover your bike in a day, there is a good chance it's in a city far far away.
You don't even need to buy the bikes. Just give the tracker to random citizens to put on their bikes.
Word will spread out really quickly that some bikes are bugged and there's no way to spot them (unlike the fleet of identical bikes purchased by the police department).
If it is anything like the US this would fall under petty theft and it will never warrant police notice near as much as violent crime and higher value theft nor enforcement of many traffic and property laws.
Doesn't mean someone is not losing anything but if your authorities are like ours there is just so much of it going on they cannot afford to prosecute it all for cost and more importantly, because crime statistics would show higher numbers than palatable.
Example, in California increased the dollar amount on petty thefts and damages to nearly a thousand dollars. This includes shoplifting, breaking a window to steal a small value item, and more. This effectively excuses the police from bothering because they know most courts for these crimes operate on catch and release.
Now, if your bike costs more then insure it. Sadly this is what a lot of society has become, we accept a certain level of loss because just as you can find many people who want these thieves jailed there are numbers who will claim its not their fault but societies fault for not providing.
You can't simultaneously want the police to do something about fairly small property crimes on the one hand and get upset with a lot of people being imprisoned for minor crimes on the other hand. There's not much point in prosecuting someone if they're just going to get a stern talking to if they're found guilty.
No one seems to understand this. They lament their stuff getting stolen and in the same day plan their next anti-police protest.
I personally believe the police have totally forgotten their mandate. They’ve become so focused on the big fish, they’ve lost all appetite for anything that doesn’t have the potential to lead to a big press conference.
I want every single little crime investigated like NCIS, not because I think it will lead to less crime (I know the jury goes back and forth on this one), but because I think people don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods anymore, they constantly feel like their neighbors are gonna steal from them and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If instead cops started taking all this stuff seriously, and the courts had a better way to handle it, people would be happier and feel less antagonistic against those they perceive as other (white, black, etc)
Until police stop focusing on them and they start gradually making themselves noticeable, and eventually you wish your city had a bike theft problem instead of a gang problem. Source: lived in several very un-Danish gang-run settings around the world.
Indeed, concern about theft is one of the things that holds back adoption of cycling as a form of transportation in the US. I'm lucky that I live in an area where anti-theft aeshetics (tm) are sufficient to protect my bike, but in bigger cities it's a nightmare.
There's a dollar value threshold that the police use when deciding whether to investigate a theft. A simple measure would be to eliminate that threshold for bikes.
For means of transportation in general. Or to be even more general: value of an item + how much time it costs to replace it at say 100$/hour + potential missed work/opportunities/meetings at say 1000$/day.
Stealing a bike (or a scooter or other means of transportation) is just a very damaging crime.
I think police should be pro-active catching thieves (that if setting prop bikes to steal and catching the takers). Instilling some fear in the thieves' would be a huge progress.
It absolutely does. I own a bike, but I’ll only use it for exercise rather than transportation because everyone I know who uses a bike for transit accepts theft as an eventual certain.
If the US actually wants to reduce carbon emissions, prosecuting bike theft (and making cycling safer in general) is low hanging fruit. To the extent that carbon reduction requires behavioral change, cycling is (anecdotally) a behavioral change people actually really want to make, but US cities make it harder and more expensive than it needs to be.
To take public transit in my city costs $1200 a year. Even though I've had a bike stolen once every 3 or 4 years over the last quarter century, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than the next cheapest transportation option by a wide margin.
Agreed even with stolen bikes the math works out. I have 2 types of bikes -- a beater that I'm ok getting stolen once a year or so for the convenience of feeling ok locking it anywhere, and others that I would never leave unattended in the city but use for exercise, commute, or offroad recreation.
> There's a dollar value threshold that the police use when deciding whether to investigate a theft.
That's disgustingly cynical. With the possible exception of some cargo bikes, I would guess the cost of a bike correlates strongly with how easily its owner can cope with its loss.
Maybe, but it might be inversely correlated. I have an expensive bike, but I also have the means to replace it if stolen. When I was younger and had less disposable income, the theft of my less expensive bike would have been more devastating.
We have special laws in most places for the theft of automobiles. Prior to that, there were special laws for the theft of horses (with pretty steep penalties, as I understand).
Don’t you think the reason why most Danes are against nonwestern immigration because they don’t want to go towards being an ethnic minority, like Swedes are in Malmö just across the bridge?
It's different in Europe, here natives who express concern over the preservation of their heritage, culture or don't wish to be a minority in their ethnic homeland are generally seen as racist. In US (and elsewhere in the world) it seems to be more accepted that natives deserve special protections and privileges.
I have family who live in an area which over the last few decades has become majority immigrant (as in most people from the area weren't born in Britain) and overwhelmingly non-British (75%+, if I remember correctly). Crime has become extremely bad and my elderly family feel culturally isolated as one of the few non-muslim, British residents left on their council block.
I honestly don't understand what people mean about immigration not affecting normal people. I can only assume they're just talking about the middle-class educated working immigrants who speak English -- you know, the kind of immigrant the average middle class person associates with. Presumably they don't live in a flat where most people no longer celebrate Christmas, don't speak your language, and don't work. I have female family members from that area who have been groomed, my own GF was sexually abused and accused of being a "white-who*e" several times.
If immigration isn't affecting you personally, that's great. Now I'm in a middle-class area it's not something I worry about much anymore either, but I urge people to try living in these majority areas for a bit if they believe mass-non-western-immigration into Europe is no problem.
> most people no longer celebrate Christmas, don't speak your language, and don't work
I find this the most alarming part of what Europe is doing. In the USA they had a welfare system back in the 1960s that many saw as actively discouraged employment and dual parent households. These policies were meant to help American Blacks recover from centuries of discrimination. But the unfortunate part is that it just ended up creating permanent ghetto subcultures of culturally ingrained poverty, crime, and government dependency.
> But the unfortunate part is that it just ended up creating permanent ghetto subcultures of culturally ingrained poverty, crime, and government dependency.
Are you sure it was the welfare state that created it, and not continued discrimination, redlining, and systemic racism?
I don't believe all the people and organizations carrying out those practices just shriveled up and died as soon as the CRA was passed. You're looking at wet streets, and deducing that they obviously caused rain.
>In the USA they had a welfare system back in the 1960s that many saw as actively discouraged employment and dual parent households.
The US had a welfare system since the 30s, and it primarily benefited whites. Blacks were systematically discriminated against, denied benefits, and kicked off benefits where whites were not.
> “From the early history of the country’s welfare programs, allowing local discretion as to who can receive benefits has continually led to African American families receiving less or getting tossed off the rolls altogether. When mothers’ pensions, the precursor to welfare, were launched in the early 20th century, they mostly went to white women. Case workers had a fair amount of discretion in who received these pensions, and they believed African American women should work—something they tended to believe was beneath white women. They regularly denied African American women pensions” [1]
> “The ADC was an extension of the state-operated mothers’ pension programs, where white widows were the primary beneficiaries. The criteria for eligibility and need were state-determined, so blacks continued to be barred from full participation because the country operated under the “separate but equal” doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court in 1896.” [2]
When more blacks were able to enroll in programs, due to LBJ’s war on poverty and the civil rights movement, attitudes on welfare began to change. Then Reagan played on those racial attitudes and shaped the modern conception of the lazy black welfare queen ghetto culture.
> “The term “welfare” had a positive connotation among Americans before the 1960s, according to Soss, but as the program became more diverse, stereotypes about “freeloaders” started to emerge.” [1]
>” During [the Reagan administration], data from public polls indicate that a growing percentage of Americans believed that slackness and lack of motivation to work were the main causes of poverty” [3]
> “This anti-welfare-ideology manifested itself in an altered perception of welfare recipients and a changed view on poverty. The poor were no longer regarded as victims of the economic system… Blaming the poor for their life situation is nothing new, but within the Reagan years stigmatization intensified drastically. Besides emphasizing dependency over poverty, the government allowed the term welfare to be further labeled by race and gender. Although welfare has always been associated with these terms, the administration’s welfare-state-rhetoric involved severe generalizations and moralistic accusations. Additionally, the promotion of negative stereotypes incorporated the distinction between those in need of protection, the undeserving poor, and the deserving poor, including “welfare queens” and “freeloaders”. The “truly needy” considered as deserving assistance, are, inter alia, the elderly or disabled, so to speak groups who should not be expected to work.” [3]
> These policies were meant to help American Blacks recover from centuries of discrimination. But the unfortunate part is that it just ended up creating permanent ghetto subcultures of culturally ingrained poverty, crime, and government dependency.
There is little to no data indicating welfare is responsible for black poverty. There is lots of data that hundreds of years of slavery, followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow, followed by redlining [4], followed by using highway construction, urban planning, and eminent domain to destroy black communities [5], followed by the war on drugs created expressly so Nixon could target black people [6], and hundreds of other policies and actions targeting black people and black communities are responsible for black poverty.
> “We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid th...
I honestly don't have either the time or the will to look into this subject now, but having read some of Thomas Sowell's books (and listened to some conversations on YouTube), I remember reading statistics proving the opposite.
Namely that black poverty was already decreasing before the 1960s and that the progress was slowed down by the welfare policies. Those years also brought the destruction of family (increase of single parent household supported by welfare) which pushed a generation of unstable kids into poverty.
> black poverty was already decreasing before the 1960s
All poverty was decreasing before the 60s. Black poverty was just decreasing much more slowly than whites. So let’s talk about the times leading up to the 60s.
In 1947, half (49%) of all college students were military veterans, going to school on their GI Bills ($137 billion government money spent in today’s dollars). However since blacks were straight up banned from southern universities, and effectively banned from northern ones, of the few black veterans able to collect at all, 95% ended up in unaccredited or underfunded black universities, while whites filled the ivy league. Since being an alumni gives your children and grandchildren preference, whites are still directly benefiting while blacks were shut out.
By 1955, nearly a third of all post war home loans had been GI bill loans ($316 billion in todays dollars). However, since blacks were banned from buying homes in white neighborhoods (otherwise known as any desirable neighborhood) and banks would just deny black loans in black neighborhoods, they were unable to buy homes, and the few homes they were able to buy were in the least desirable areas. In places where black veterans made up almost 40% of the veteran population, 99% of approved GI home loans still went to whites. The overall homeownership gap between whites and blacks doubled from pre to post-WWII.
Since home values skyrocketed in value over the next several decades, homeownership and education are the cornerstones of wealth generation and intergenerational wealth, and a college leads to much higher lifetime earnings, is it any surprise that white wealth boomed along with the post-WWII economy and black wealth didn’t? Is it any wonder that the children of the now financially secure post-WWII white families also did well and benefited from their preferential legacy college admissions and financial freedom and security of their family? The US government handed out $450 billion in today’s money, over 95% going to whites, allowing them to own homes and get valuable educations during the biggest economic boom in the country’s history.
So no, black poverty wasn’t slowed by welfare, it was just that white poverty was massively cut (and white intergenerational wealth increased) with home ownership and education, while being denied to blacks. While welfare is, and was, not perfect, it is not the primary driver or cause of black inequality in the US.
> Thomas Sowell's books (and listened to some conversations on YouTube), I remember reading statistics proving the opposite.
Tomas Sowell is a perfect example of the phrase “data without context is meaningless”, where he basically blames violent “ghetto culture” caused by liberal welfare and public housing, while ignoring actual economic activities going on. Things like the massive amount of urban decline (or urban decay) that has happened across the US in the last 50 years. Something that has economically disadvantaged and trapped people of all races, but blacks most of all due to the redlining and white flight to the newly built suburbs in the 50s and 60s (that blacks weren’t allowed to buy). The massive drug war that directly targeted black individuals and neighborhoods, both by accident and by design, and the subsequent explosion of imprisoned blacks. Funny how drug use rates between whites and blacks are basically the same, but blacks are 4-6 times more likely to be arrested, convicted, and have longer prison times for drug crimes. Even what I have talked about is only one part of the picture, but Sowell bends over backwards blame everything on welfare making blacks violent and lazy.
> In US (and elsewhere in the world) it seems to be more accepted that natives deserve special protections and privileges.
Hence the reservations I guess. Very "privileged"...
I agree with the rest of your post though. Actually right now in France, since immigration is starting to hurt some of the classes that traditionally promoted it (teachers with the beheading affair, politicians losing against ethnic lists in some cities, journalists being aggressed, one in coma) the public discourse is slowly changing... a little. When everyone, up to the president and people in the parliament will be negatively affected, things will change fast. Until then people having legit complains will be labeled racists.
> In US (and elsewhere in the world) it seems to be more accepted that natives deserve special protections and privileges.
It isn’t more accepted, it is a different situation where these natives were systematically wiped out and almost completely destroyed entirely. They are given special protections now (not privileges) because they are still feeling the very real effects of active cultural destruction, forced sterilizations, children kidnapped and put into “reeducation camps”, etc. The British government is not banning speaking English or forcing children to attend Islamic schools or banning white Britons from owning property.
> I have family who live in an area which over the last few decades has become majority immigrant
It sounds like what you mean is the neighborhood has become majority poor. The low-income immigrants moving in were likely an effect of, not a cause of, the neighborhood’s economic decline. Lack of economic opportunity is strongly correlated with crime, immigration status is not.
> Now I'm in a middle-class area it's not something I worry about much anymore
As I suspected. You should probably look into what city planning policies, or lack thereof, and other economic factors are allowing this kind of neighborhood disinvestment, and not blame the low income people who may or may not be immigrants that move to the housing that they can afford.
Now I'm in a middle-class area it's not something I worry about much anymore either, but I urge people to try living in these majority areas for a bit if they believe mass-non-western-immigration into Europe is no problem.
I also grew up in Britain and I grew up on a road where there were only 2 or 3 white families and there was a Mosque. I went to a primary school were the majority of kids were non-white. Your description of immigration does not match my experience.
Presumably they don't live in a flat where most people no longer celebrate Christmas, don't speak your language, and don't work.
This is an inaccurate racist stereotype. My muslim neighbours bought me a Christmas present, spoke English and worked.
If 90%-95% of Europeans were killed by foreign invaders, and the remaining survivors were herded from concentration camp to reservation to concentration camp, and were then consistently robbed of their land by the government and resource extraction firms, you may be able to reasonably compare the plight of a native Dane to that of a native American.
Since that has not happened, such a comparison comes off as both incredibly tone-deaf, and incredibly ignorant of history.
PS. It's not Native Americans[1] that are driving anti-immigration sentiment in the United States.
[1] Yes, obviously, some of them harbour such sentiment. They don't make up the majority of the political support for it, though. Most of that support comes from European immigrants and descendants of European immigrants, many of whom were admitted into the country with not much more than the clothes on their backs.
The key is to catch the people who buy stolen bikes in bulk. The thieves need somewhere to fence the bikes, without that they'd be stuck trying to unload them on the street. Years ago in Toronto they arrested a single person who had warehouses of stolen bikes [1]. After that bike theft dropped dramatically.
Anecdotally, bike thefts in Toronto are as high as ever. It's most likely a mix of an increase in the number of cyclists + bikes in the city as well as more brazen and organized thieves.
I've had two thefts in twice as many years recently. A handful of friends have also had their bikes stolen in the last two years. It's very demoralizing.
Stolen bikes are often take to Poland and other Eastern European countries. With the current border control in Denmark we could solve a large part of the problem by stopping outbound trafic, rather than incoming.
Would you prefer they count each bike as a separate crime so that once somebody has stolen a certain quantity they'll be locked up for life?
16 months combined with some sort of monitoring afterwards (and, in an ideal world, support in jail and afterwards to find it easy to move into legal work) should be enough to make the crime not worth doing and to hopefully stop that person doing it again.
Not just refugees. The racist nationalists over at the Danish People's Party also passed sweeping reforms during their reign that made it cripplingly difficult for Danes like myself to sponsor their partner for residency.
We've been stuck in the system for more than a year now, $17k saved for the pound of flesh they demand.
The current PM, Mette Frederiksen, has lead the charge in morphing her party into a milder form of the People's Party. I never expected to see my country turn into this hyper-nationalist racist bastion but here we are.
Meanwhile I've had two of my bikes stolen in the last year so from this subjective point of view everything is worse.
want to make Danes feel safe? Actually do something about crime that affect normal people
In 1990's America, this was called "community policing." The idea was that if you cracked down on small, quality-of-life crimes, the bigger crimes would also come down. The logic was that people who commit big crimes don't think twice about also committing small crimes.
This led to New York's famous "piss and beer" patrols, which targeted small crimes like people drinking beer and urinating in public. Which eventually led to allegations of racial profiling, and the patrols being eliminated.
Racial profiling is bad. But in the cities where I've seen the quality-of-life crimes addressed, it's actually worked. But I don't think any city does it anymore because the practice has been labeled and tainted.
The process became labeled and tainted because quality of life" was left to mostly the ivory tower crowd and beurocrats to define and they defined it as "standards of behavior not befitting my suburb". The end result was that the police were told to harass everyone who was working on their car on the street, drinking on the front porch or playing loud music (i.e. things nobody in the communities where they happen considers abnormal) and the police who didn't really want to enforce that stuff picked the people who they felt the least empathy for to enforce it on (hint: those people were mostly poor and not white).
It works in that it used the almighty jackboot to root out violations of minor local ordinances in exactly the kinds of neighborhoods where nobody wanted those ordinances in the first place. And that makes it a crappy place to live. And of course the criminals move elsewhere, because career criminals tend to not have very long term living arrangements and can easily relocate to neighborhoods where you're not gonna get harassed for walking your dog with beer in hand. The problem just shuffles around. Also enforcing laws that criminalize what a community considers normal behavior is exactly how you destroy community trust.
Community policing reduced crime, because people begrudgingly violated minor laws less publicly, but it didn't increase standards of living.
What do you expect them to do? Fingerprint the scene of the crime and run it all against a database of petty thieves? I know my city of Portland has bait bikes and things like that, but I think people severely over-estimate the abilities of local law enforcement to solve these kinds of crimes.
Yes. I don't think they're doing any real investigative work with cars either. But of course the likelihood of actually recovering something that big and complicated does go up slightly anyway. And I still don't think they can really do anything unless they happen upon the car and can identify it by the VIN or whatever.
The real problem is the lack of incentives for the police to do anything and common directives coming from above for political reasons.
They get paid with tax money and it doesn't matter whether they arrest 50 thieves or 0.
Paradoxically if they do their job less, politicians can do political campaign and find excuses to raise taxes and allocate more money to the police.
Besides, the centralised nature of the police make it so that some crimes are given more priority than others, which is probably what you were alluding to. Why is my country spending 1mln man hours per year persecuting small cannabis dealers and doesn't do anything about people doing real estate scams? (real story which happened to me and the Metropolitan police just closed the case, after having evidence, the location of the guy, the evidence on Companies House he was creating companies with fake names to reset his reputation and after having arrested and released the guy).
If me and my neighbourhood had our own private insurance, private police and our own private laws we could agree not to persecute victimless crimes, to have a number of patrolling agents, to have a certain level of security monitoring.
All of these services would have a cost and we could decide whether to pay it or not. If the police would do a bad job we could hire another police agency. Or we could not pay anyone and have our own internal armed force keeping law and order (think of a rural poor village having different needs compared to a city).
So, what does this map tell us? Where bikes are being used, bikes will be stolen. The higher the proportion of expensive bikes, the more thefts. Unfortunately one of the facts of life, but do we really need a map for that?
I think it also tells us that students use bikes and students insure their bikes (assuming it's claim data. Actually. given we don't know where this data is from I don't think this tells us anything at all).
Naive non-England-living eye, but it looks to me like a heatmap of population, or a very good proxy thereof.
Seems it would be more useful to show [monthly bike thefts per square km] divided by [population per sq km]. Or perhaps better yet the denominator would be [bikes per sq km].
I'd want to know if there is relative safety in numbers, i.e., lower likelihood that my particular bike will be stolen in the highly bike-dense areas, or the opposite because the thieves over-focus their efforts in the bike-dense areas.
Unsafety in numbers, because in a place with hardly any cyclists nobody will develop a bike theft habit.
There is some safety in average price of bikes, if your ride is noticeably below average and still secured like the more expensive ones it will be virtually immune to theft. So in a place with more expensive bikes the threshold were theft risk begins can be much higher than in places where everybody goes cheap (because of all the thievery)
PS: and "because of all the thievery" is a viscous cycle phenomenon, because people who buy cheap due to thievery are the ones most likely to buy pre-owned. Legit pre-owned or not, and the cheaper the less they care.
I never lived in a place like that, but I suspect that in places like Amsterdam or Copenhagen the cycle of theft is bordering on turning into something that is effectively more like a service charge, as in occasionally your bike disappears for random unscheduled refurbishing/resale and you just go to the next "refurbishment center"/fence and pay them for a freshly serviced bike, hardly more than you'd pay for service the regular way, if you brought in own bike (and you'd have no bike in the meantime).
It almost sounds a bit romantic, but the huge downside is that you can't really use a higher value bike in that scenario and that severely reduces the general utility of cycling: the cheap clunkers that fit well into the "random unscheduled refurbishing" pattern might be fine on short distances, but they tend to be unbearably bad for longer rides (similar to bikeshare bikes, just not quite that bad)
Interesting to think of it as (almost) a service cycle of involuntary/unscheduled servicing - ha!
But it's a real problem. What's the solution, a medium-distance-rideable bike that actually folds up into a suitcase like the Jetson's flying car? The folding bikes today all seem inadequate, so it'd need to be made of magic unobtanium, but would that even solve the problem?
On routine routes, protected bike parking could make the medium-distance-rideable bike viable. Make it a voluntary unscheduled servicing thing, so that there are some people on premise, not just some camera access vending machine thing.
If this data is based off their claims data, it will also be affected by their underwriting appetite..
As an example, if an area has a known particularly high theft rate, they may price themselves out of the market for that area and as a result, receive far fewer claims.
Does anyone here have a good link to an investigation into UK bike theft? Who is responsible? Is it their full time job? Do they work in firms, where do the bikes end up, and what are the profit margins for thieves? If the thieves are individual and petty, how do they fence locally without being caught?
189 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIt knows where your bike is at all times. It would be cool if one could use the ratio of where people park compared to how often something is stolen from there or something. Like, is it really an unsafe spot or just a popular one? Or is it really a safe spot, or a really unsafe one therefore almost no one uses it any more.
I hadn't realised Calgacus was talking about bicycle theft!
Edit: Just to confirm, up here north of the walls (note the plural) we do actually have bicycles.
I can click a borough, it alone becomes green-ish. I click another, that becomes purple. I have no indication what these colors are supposed to be or if something is supposed to happen?
https://i.imgur.com/zYisbCx.png
Is the idea that those are places where bikes are stolen? If so, isn't this just going to highlight towns and cities because that's lots of bikes are (particularly somewhere like Cambridge where there are loads of bikes), and wouldn't it be better to do per-capita bike thefts? Otherwise this is just a map of where bikes are, rather than where it's more or less dangerous to leave your bike unattended.
Edit: Actually, thefts per bike per capita. Just per capita doesn't take out the fact that there are some places with loads more bikes, like Cambridge. That's presuming the idea is to show where it's most likely that your bike will get stolen.
edit: Looks like it loads the outer level heat map data first, then the next level, etc. However, zooming in at this point breaks the site and turns it white. (This is on FF(87)). National Average widget also fails to load on FF, but works on Chrome, same goes for the zoom-in-page-turns-white-bug.
That's bullshit, want to make Danes feel safe? Actually do something about crime that affect normal people, like bike theft. Most people don't notice gangs and aren't affected by it, but I'd bet that most adult Dane have had a bike or two stolen.
Oh yes, refugees. Never had a single problem with them. A nice Syrian restaurant would actually be on my wishlist.
tbh what could they do about it ? They can't really go full NCIS over a stolen backpack. There are thousands of "minor" thefts, and other small crimes/offences, every day in big cities, they'd need thousands of people to review videos, look for potential witnesses, follow the trail, &c.
By prosecuting one person, you could prevent thousands of future stolen bags.
So the broken windows theory would say that seeing graffiti and panhandling would signal to other people that the area had a more general sense of lawlessness, that criminality was more normalized, and that if they commits crimes they would likely not be punished. However, the broken windows theory has been pretty soundly debunked and leads to tons of discriminatory targeting. [1][2]
[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-break-the-broken...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-problem-with-...
It's a regular project management problem, there are N police officers and NxM crimes to solve (0<M<∞) at a different cost now prioritize their work.
Invest more in petty crime might have more gain in the future but might lead to more serious crimes in the short term (or not)
When parking outside when commuting and stuff, it's mostly homeless people nicking a wheel or a seatpost or bike lights. Still annoying and somewhat expensive, but I can understand that this type of crime is hard to do something about / investigate. But it could be "solved" by helping those in these situations better so they don't feel the need to do these petty-crimes (prevention rather than punishment).
Sometimes it's quicker to be a gang
Note the time in the top right. 2 minutes.
Danish police cracked down on them and returned my bike with the help of the VIN system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_bicycle_VIN-system
I mean second hand bicycles are a big market in the Netherlands, what kind of checks should you go through to make sure a private bicycle seller is legitimate.
I mean if you are buying a banged up 'stationfiets' just to commute is there really a way to know?
If you can reasonably know something is stolen you are liable under Dutch law. That applies to everything, not just bikes.
Buying a new ATB for 50 Euro would be such a thing where you can reasonably know it was stolen.
Actual lookup interface here: https://fdr.rdw.nl
Also, knowing that a bike should have an ID or a working tracer chip and seeing it missing is enough of a reason not to buy it, or knowing that if you buy it anyway you're on the hook for it.
Mostly I think bikes stolen in Denmark end up in Eastern Europe anyway.
Unless you mean the 'buying from a homeless person' part. Receiving stolen goods, would probably come down to if the jury or judge believed your claims that you had every reason to expect that the homeless guy really did own a $3K bike they wanted to sell.
If such products were legal and regulated, there would be legal avenues (the courts) for disputes to be settled, rather than violence.
It's the black market that causes the violence, not the products themselves. Something to consider.
Two gangs fighting over who's entitled to sell drugs on which street are, in some sense, minding their business.
A guy who is taking my bike from my home is invading deeply into my territory.
If you're goal is to make people feel safer, then you need to target the petty stuff that people actually experience. Also, much of the petty stuff is only petty because the police view it in isolation. Yeah, so what if my bike is stolen, insurance will deal with that. It's just that when they do catch a bike thief, then it often turns out that the same person stole 200 other bikes. Stealing a 3000DKK bike isn't worth the effort, but it's 50.000 bikes a year, that's an insane amount of money, given that almost no bike is ever returned.
I don't care if people on Christiania smokes or sell weed, and nor does most other people. Sure people should not experience gun violence, even in ghetto areas, but you can't direct all policing towards a few specific types of crime. It won't make people feel any safer.
Idk, if I had anti-tank missiles used in my region (like with the Nordic Biker Wars in the 90ies) or hand grenades like in Sweden more recently, I'd feel a lot less safe than if that doesn't happen but bikes are stolen more frequently. People tend to care more about getting shot, stabbed or blown up than about their transportation being stolen. Policies reflect that, imho with good reason.
It's like saying you don't need a vaccine because you never get sick. Yeah there's a reason for that.
So yes, the police should focus more on human and drug traffic than bike theft.
Don't know where "here" is, but I'm guessing not in Scandinavia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Biker_War
Nobody wants that shit in their vicinity, and it's the correct call to crack down on that instead of looking for stolen rucksacks or bikes.
https://dkr.dk/ungdomskriminalitet/bander/bander-i-tal/
Someone threatens you with force: That will affect you. Even if nothing happened physically. You wish you can get rid of that experience for 50.000 DKK for the rest of your life.
Most likely, yes, they will find the people who attacked you, but you where still attacked.
Simply buy a fleet of bikes, fit trackers and motion alarms to each, somewhere hard to detect like inside the tyres, then park them around the city secured by shitty locks in areas covered by CCTV, and then as soon as any bike moves more than a few feet, go arrest the person moving it.
Considering in a city of 10 Million people, there are probably only 100 who actively walk around with bolt cutters, it should be a simple case of finding every thief.
Once you've found the thieves, the harder task is making them stop stealing bikes. Encourage courts to hand out "get drug free or go to prison" sentences. Offer new identities in new cities to people who have picked friends they regret...
Also don't forget that thieves are not stupid, trackers can be easily disabled and cameras avoided
Not hard at all if you make bike theft an automatic death sentence...
But everything else with an equally low bar to entry is much crappier. Stealing bikes and cats you get to be your own boss. Doing manual labor you have to show up on time, not do drugs on the job. Working for the gig economy crap you have to please some of the worst of the general public and a black box algorithm. Sure you can try run scrap, do odd jobs or part out cars but if you do either of those enough to make "stealing stuff" levels of money the government will be up your ass the same way they would be if you were stealing cats and bikes.
These people aren't desperate. They're assessing their options for making a buck and it's no surprise that the "I don't car what other people think" subset chooses petty crime. They need better options for making a buck. Not stuff that alleviates the need to make a buck. Most people willing to incur the risks involved stealing stuff have enough initiative and work ethic they're not gonna sit at home and smoke pot all day if the government gives them a handout.
Something like Lojack but for bikes would be another way to go, if a city would commit to pursuing thefts of bikes with GPS trackers (with the additional incentive that it would likely lead to more recoveries).
Do that - and you'll be accused in "using the police to disproportionally punish the poor instead of working on the crimes that actually matter and helping the communities to get out of the vicious poverty cycle"
Sarcasm aside, this has some rationale: say you caught a bike thief. What you gonna do next? Fine him? He likely has no money. Put him into prison? Will cause more problems down the road.
Whipping his ass in Trafalgar Square would be a good option, but is highly unlikely to ever happen...
I'm afraid I don't feel bad buying a bike from a dodgy guy in a street corner to replace my bike that was taken by a dodgy guy from a street corner...
i sometimes dream about eastern european villages where everyone rides superlight fullies and aero racers.
And if you are buying a 1000€ bike for 50€ you can be pretty sure it is stolen and buying stolen goods is illegal and can get you in trouble (if the police would actually be doing anything about bike theft...)
I've seen it countless times in Italy, people don't even bother buying an expensive bike, they just buy some half broken bike (usually from the same dodgy guys in the streets who steal them) because they know they will get stolen. The police doesn't even bother fighting it, they often talk to many of the immigrants and rarely do something. I know because, as a second generation immigrant from Africa, the police was always stopping me just to talk.
It's kind of like bike sharing, you pay 20 euros until the next time they steal it from you.
On the plus side, it's giving a livelihood to poor and desperate immigrants who can't find a job in the sad Italian economy.
If it wasn't for bike theft and drug dealing, things would probably escalate to worse crimes.
Look at this crazy story to see how international it can get: https://cyclingindustry.news/vanmoofs-pledge-to-recover-stol...
Word will spread out really quickly that some bikes are bugged and there's no way to spot them (unlike the fleet of identical bikes purchased by the police department).
Doesn't mean someone is not losing anything but if your authorities are like ours there is just so much of it going on they cannot afford to prosecute it all for cost and more importantly, because crime statistics would show higher numbers than palatable.
Example, in California increased the dollar amount on petty thefts and damages to nearly a thousand dollars. This includes shoplifting, breaking a window to steal a small value item, and more. This effectively excuses the police from bothering because they know most courts for these crimes operate on catch and release.
Now, if your bike costs more then insure it. Sadly this is what a lot of society has become, we accept a certain level of loss because just as you can find many people who want these thieves jailed there are numbers who will claim its not their fault but societies fault for not providing.
I personally believe the police have totally forgotten their mandate. They’ve become so focused on the big fish, they’ve lost all appetite for anything that doesn’t have the potential to lead to a big press conference.
I want every single little crime investigated like NCIS, not because I think it will lead to less crime (I know the jury goes back and forth on this one), but because I think people don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods anymore, they constantly feel like their neighbors are gonna steal from them and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If instead cops started taking all this stuff seriously, and the courts had a better way to handle it, people would be happier and feel less antagonistic against those they perceive as other (white, black, etc)
Until police stop focusing on them and they start gradually making themselves noticeable, and eventually you wish your city had a bike theft problem instead of a gang problem. Source: lived in several very un-Danish gang-run settings around the world.
There's a dollar value threshold that the police use when deciding whether to investigate a theft. A simple measure would be to eliminate that threshold for bikes.
Stealing a bike (or a scooter or other means of transportation) is just a very damaging crime. I think police should be pro-active catching thieves (that if setting prop bikes to steal and catching the takers). Instilling some fear in the thieves' would be a huge progress.
If the US actually wants to reduce carbon emissions, prosecuting bike theft (and making cycling safer in general) is low hanging fruit. To the extent that carbon reduction requires behavioral change, cycling is (anecdotally) a behavioral change people actually really want to make, but US cities make it harder and more expensive than it needs to be.
That's disgustingly cynical. With the possible exception of some cargo bikes, I would guess the cost of a bike correlates strongly with how easily its owner can cope with its loss.
I see no reason why bikes should be exempt.
I have family who live in an area which over the last few decades has become majority immigrant (as in most people from the area weren't born in Britain) and overwhelmingly non-British (75%+, if I remember correctly). Crime has become extremely bad and my elderly family feel culturally isolated as one of the few non-muslim, British residents left on their council block.
I honestly don't understand what people mean about immigration not affecting normal people. I can only assume they're just talking about the middle-class educated working immigrants who speak English -- you know, the kind of immigrant the average middle class person associates with. Presumably they don't live in a flat where most people no longer celebrate Christmas, don't speak your language, and don't work. I have female family members from that area who have been groomed, my own GF was sexually abused and accused of being a "white-who*e" several times.
If immigration isn't affecting you personally, that's great. Now I'm in a middle-class area it's not something I worry about much anymore either, but I urge people to try living in these majority areas for a bit if they believe mass-non-western-immigration into Europe is no problem.
I find this the most alarming part of what Europe is doing. In the USA they had a welfare system back in the 1960s that many saw as actively discouraged employment and dual parent households. These policies were meant to help American Blacks recover from centuries of discrimination. But the unfortunate part is that it just ended up creating permanent ghetto subcultures of culturally ingrained poverty, crime, and government dependency.
Are you sure it was the welfare state that created it, and not continued discrimination, redlining, and systemic racism?
I don't believe all the people and organizations carrying out those practices just shriveled up and died as soon as the CRA was passed. You're looking at wet streets, and deducing that they obviously caused rain.
Racism is a problem that has existed and probably always will, but I don't think it is appropriate to blame racism for of all of modern day ills.
The US had a welfare system since the 30s, and it primarily benefited whites. Blacks were systematically discriminated against, denied benefits, and kicked off benefits where whites were not.
> “From the early history of the country’s welfare programs, allowing local discretion as to who can receive benefits has continually led to African American families receiving less or getting tossed off the rolls altogether. When mothers’ pensions, the precursor to welfare, were launched in the early 20th century, they mostly went to white women. Case workers had a fair amount of discretion in who received these pensions, and they believed African American women should work—something they tended to believe was beneath white women. They regularly denied African American women pensions” [1]
> “The ADC was an extension of the state-operated mothers’ pension programs, where white widows were the primary beneficiaries. The criteria for eligibility and need were state-determined, so blacks continued to be barred from full participation because the country operated under the “separate but equal” doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court in 1896.” [2]
When more blacks were able to enroll in programs, due to LBJ’s war on poverty and the civil rights movement, attitudes on welfare began to change. Then Reagan played on those racial attitudes and shaped the modern conception of the lazy black welfare queen ghetto culture.
> “The term “welfare” had a positive connotation among Americans before the 1960s, according to Soss, but as the program became more diverse, stereotypes about “freeloaders” started to emerge.” [1]
>” During [the Reagan administration], data from public polls indicate that a growing percentage of Americans believed that slackness and lack of motivation to work were the main causes of poverty” [3]
> “This anti-welfare-ideology manifested itself in an altered perception of welfare recipients and a changed view on poverty. The poor were no longer regarded as victims of the economic system… Blaming the poor for their life situation is nothing new, but within the Reagan years stigmatization intensified drastically. Besides emphasizing dependency over poverty, the government allowed the term welfare to be further labeled by race and gender. Although welfare has always been associated with these terms, the administration’s welfare-state-rhetoric involved severe generalizations and moralistic accusations. Additionally, the promotion of negative stereotypes incorporated the distinction between those in need of protection, the undeserving poor, and the deserving poor, including “welfare queens” and “freeloaders”. The “truly needy” considered as deserving assistance, are, inter alia, the elderly or disabled, so to speak groups who should not be expected to work.” [3]
> These policies were meant to help American Blacks recover from centuries of discrimination. But the unfortunate part is that it just ended up creating permanent ghetto subcultures of culturally ingrained poverty, crime, and government dependency.
There is little to no data indicating welfare is responsible for black poverty. There is lots of data that hundreds of years of slavery, followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow, followed by redlining [4], followed by using highway construction, urban planning, and eminent domain to destroy black communities [5], followed by the war on drugs created expressly so Nixon could target black people [6], and hundreds of other policies and actions targeting black people and black communities are responsible for black poverty.
> “We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid th...
Namely that black poverty was already decreasing before the 1960s and that the progress was slowed down by the welfare policies. Those years also brought the destruction of family (increase of single parent household supported by welfare) which pushed a generation of unstable kids into poverty.
All poverty was decreasing before the 60s. Black poverty was just decreasing much more slowly than whites. So let’s talk about the times leading up to the 60s.
In 1947, half (49%) of all college students were military veterans, going to school on their GI Bills ($137 billion government money spent in today’s dollars). However since blacks were straight up banned from southern universities, and effectively banned from northern ones, of the few black veterans able to collect at all, 95% ended up in unaccredited or underfunded black universities, while whites filled the ivy league. Since being an alumni gives your children and grandchildren preference, whites are still directly benefiting while blacks were shut out.
By 1955, nearly a third of all post war home loans had been GI bill loans ($316 billion in todays dollars). However, since blacks were banned from buying homes in white neighborhoods (otherwise known as any desirable neighborhood) and banks would just deny black loans in black neighborhoods, they were unable to buy homes, and the few homes they were able to buy were in the least desirable areas. In places where black veterans made up almost 40% of the veteran population, 99% of approved GI home loans still went to whites. The overall homeownership gap between whites and blacks doubled from pre to post-WWII.
Since home values skyrocketed in value over the next several decades, homeownership and education are the cornerstones of wealth generation and intergenerational wealth, and a college leads to much higher lifetime earnings, is it any surprise that white wealth boomed along with the post-WWII economy and black wealth didn’t? Is it any wonder that the children of the now financially secure post-WWII white families also did well and benefited from their preferential legacy college admissions and financial freedom and security of their family? The US government handed out $450 billion in today’s money, over 95% going to whites, allowing them to own homes and get valuable educations during the biggest economic boom in the country’s history.
So no, black poverty wasn’t slowed by welfare, it was just that white poverty was massively cut (and white intergenerational wealth increased) with home ownership and education, while being denied to blacks. While welfare is, and was, not perfect, it is not the primary driver or cause of black inequality in the US.
> Thomas Sowell's books (and listened to some conversations on YouTube), I remember reading statistics proving the opposite.
Tomas Sowell is a perfect example of the phrase “data without context is meaningless”, where he basically blames violent “ghetto culture” caused by liberal welfare and public housing, while ignoring actual economic activities going on. Things like the massive amount of urban decline (or urban decay) that has happened across the US in the last 50 years. Something that has economically disadvantaged and trapped people of all races, but blacks most of all due to the redlining and white flight to the newly built suburbs in the 50s and 60s (that blacks weren’t allowed to buy). The massive drug war that directly targeted black individuals and neighborhoods, both by accident and by design, and the subsequent explosion of imprisoned blacks. Funny how drug use rates between whites and blacks are basically the same, but blacks are 4-6 times more likely to be arrested, convicted, and have longer prison times for drug crimes. Even what I have talked about is only one part of the picture, but Sowell bends over backwards blame everything on welfare making blacks violent and lazy.
Hence the reservations I guess. Very "privileged"...
I agree with the rest of your post though. Actually right now in France, since immigration is starting to hurt some of the classes that traditionally promoted it (teachers with the beheading affair, politicians losing against ethnic lists in some cities, journalists being aggressed, one in coma) the public discourse is slowly changing... a little. When everyone, up to the president and people in the parliament will be negatively affected, things will change fast. Until then people having legit complains will be labeled racists.
It isn’t more accepted, it is a different situation where these natives were systematically wiped out and almost completely destroyed entirely. They are given special protections now (not privileges) because they are still feeling the very real effects of active cultural destruction, forced sterilizations, children kidnapped and put into “reeducation camps”, etc. The British government is not banning speaking English or forcing children to attend Islamic schools or banning white Britons from owning property.
> I have family who live in an area which over the last few decades has become majority immigrant
It sounds like what you mean is the neighborhood has become majority poor. The low-income immigrants moving in were likely an effect of, not a cause of, the neighborhood’s economic decline. Lack of economic opportunity is strongly correlated with crime, immigration status is not.
> Now I'm in a middle-class area it's not something I worry about much anymore
As I suspected. You should probably look into what city planning policies, or lack thereof, and other economic factors are allowing this kind of neighborhood disinvestment, and not blame the low income people who may or may not be immigrants that move to the housing that they can afford.
I also grew up in Britain and I grew up on a road where there were only 2 or 3 white families and there was a Mosque. I went to a primary school were the majority of kids were non-white. Your description of immigration does not match my experience.
Presumably they don't live in a flat where most people no longer celebrate Christmas, don't speak your language, and don't work.
This is an inaccurate racist stereotype. My muslim neighbours bought me a Christmas present, spoke English and worked.
Since that has not happened, such a comparison comes off as both incredibly tone-deaf, and incredibly ignorant of history.
PS. It's not Native Americans[1] that are driving anti-immigration sentiment in the United States.
[1] Yes, obviously, some of them harbour such sentiment. They don't make up the majority of the political support for it, though. Most of that support comes from European immigrants and descendants of European immigrants, many of whom were admitted into the country with not much more than the clothes on their backs.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kenk
I've had two thefts in twice as many years recently. A handful of friends have also had their bikes stolen in the last two years. It's very demoralizing.
When you can't turn property into quick cash, the incentive to steal goes down. A lot.
16 months combined with some sort of monitoring afterwards (and, in an ideal world, support in jail and afterwards to find it easy to move into legal work) should be enough to make the crime not worth doing and to hopefully stop that person doing it again.
Would doubling that prison time help anything?
No, but something like a log scale would've been good.
We've been stuck in the system for more than a year now, $17k saved for the pound of flesh they demand.
The current PM, Mette Frederiksen, has lead the charge in morphing her party into a milder form of the People's Party. I never expected to see my country turn into this hyper-nationalist racist bastion but here we are.
Meanwhile I've had two of my bikes stolen in the last year so from this subjective point of view everything is worse.
In 1990's America, this was called "community policing." The idea was that if you cracked down on small, quality-of-life crimes, the bigger crimes would also come down. The logic was that people who commit big crimes don't think twice about also committing small crimes.
This led to New York's famous "piss and beer" patrols, which targeted small crimes like people drinking beer and urinating in public. Which eventually led to allegations of racial profiling, and the patrols being eliminated.
Racial profiling is bad. But in the cities where I've seen the quality-of-life crimes addressed, it's actually worked. But I don't think any city does it anymore because the practice has been labeled and tainted.
It works in that it used the almighty jackboot to root out violations of minor local ordinances in exactly the kinds of neighborhoods where nobody wanted those ordinances in the first place. And that makes it a crappy place to live. And of course the criminals move elsewhere, because career criminals tend to not have very long term living arrangements and can easily relocate to neighborhoods where you're not gonna get harassed for walking your dog with beer in hand. The problem just shuffles around. Also enforcing laws that criminalize what a community considers normal behavior is exactly how you destroy community trust.
Community policing reduced crime, because people begrudgingly violated minor laws less publicly, but it didn't increase standards of living.
They get paid with tax money and it doesn't matter whether they arrest 50 thieves or 0. Paradoxically if they do their job less, politicians can do political campaign and find excuses to raise taxes and allocate more money to the police.
Besides, the centralised nature of the police make it so that some crimes are given more priority than others, which is probably what you were alluding to. Why is my country spending 1mln man hours per year persecuting small cannabis dealers and doesn't do anything about people doing real estate scams? (real story which happened to me and the Metropolitan police just closed the case, after having evidence, the location of the guy, the evidence on Companies House he was creating companies with fake names to reset his reputation and after having arrested and released the guy).
If me and my neighbourhood had our own private insurance, private police and our own private laws we could agree not to persecute victimless crimes, to have a number of patrolling agents, to have a certain level of security monitoring.
All of these services would have a cost and we could decide whether to pay it or not. If the police would do a bad job we could hire another police agency. Or we could not pay anyone and have our own internal armed force keeping law and order (think of a rural poor village having different needs compared to a city).
Zoomed in on London: https://i.imgur.com/0LLG9Bz.png
Seems it would be more useful to show [monthly bike thefts per square km] divided by [population per sq km]. Or perhaps better yet the denominator would be [bikes per sq km].
I'd want to know if there is relative safety in numbers, i.e., lower likelihood that my particular bike will be stolen in the highly bike-dense areas, or the opposite because the thieves over-focus their efforts in the bike-dense areas.
Any insights?
There is some safety in average price of bikes, if your ride is noticeably below average and still secured like the more expensive ones it will be virtually immune to theft. So in a place with more expensive bikes the threshold were theft risk begins can be much higher than in places where everybody goes cheap (because of all the thievery)
I never lived in a place like that, but I suspect that in places like Amsterdam or Copenhagen the cycle of theft is bordering on turning into something that is effectively more like a service charge, as in occasionally your bike disappears for random unscheduled refurbishing/resale and you just go to the next "refurbishment center"/fence and pay them for a freshly serviced bike, hardly more than you'd pay for service the regular way, if you brought in own bike (and you'd have no bike in the meantime).
It almost sounds a bit romantic, but the huge downside is that you can't really use a higher value bike in that scenario and that severely reduces the general utility of cycling: the cheap clunkers that fit well into the "random unscheduled refurbishing" pattern might be fine on short distances, but they tend to be unbearably bad for longer rides (similar to bikeshare bikes, just not quite that bad)
But it's a real problem. What's the solution, a medium-distance-rideable bike that actually folds up into a suitcase like the Jetson's flying car? The folding bikes today all seem inadequate, so it'd need to be made of magic unobtanium, but would that even solve the problem?