One of the things we worked on during our two-week hiatus was improving our stolen bike registry system to help combat Tucson bike thefts.
To do that, we worked with the awesome BikeIndex.org group who supplied us with a great system to register stolen bikes and list them on the site for people to keep an eye on and hopefully help recover them.
The system starts with the registration page, which ask the owners for details about the bike and the theft. Once a bike is registered, it creates a listing on BicycleTucson.com and BikeIndex.org. The hope is that if someone searches for the bike to check if it is stolen, it will popup on the internet as stolen. Check out the listing page.
In addition to checking out the listings, it’s a good idea to follow & retweet @stolenbikestuc, which tweets stolen Tucson bikes.
The system is much improved from the manual version that often found stolen bike listing requests in the spam mail.
Check it out and help fight Tucson bike theft!
I suggest adding a column for the frame Serial Number to the listing. The serial number identifies a bike uniquely, and I understand that pawn shops report serial numbers of bikes they take in on a website that detectives use to track down stolen bikes. That’s how my stolen bike was traced by police in Tucson and returned to me. All bike owners should keep a record of their bikes’ serial numbers. It is good practice for bike shops to show the serial number on receipts when selling a bike.
Yes, the usual measures (which don’t seem to get out there or sink-in) but also list your stolen bike on your local Craigslist under “Bikes.” Craigslist is crawled by search engines Google and Bing. Ideally, Craigslist would have a category for stolen bikes, but it doesn’t, for whatever reason. It would be coolest if they did…the huge online footprint and the gallery view (humans being visual-experiencing creatures nowadays).
@Roger P The serial numbers are there and you are asked to include it when registering a bike. It’s also quite searchable.
Does anyone in th . Tucson, AZ area recognize this serial number for a Diamondback mountain bike. DAF16A001473? It has a white diamondback seat, it has diamondback tires. If so please contact @ 520-304-8717 I have found your bike!!!