Every bike I’ve ever had in my life prior to 2009 has been stolen. From my own backyard, time after time, locked or unlocked. People LOVE to steal bikes. Sometimes it’s because they don’t like you but most of the time bike thieves don’t know or care who they’re stealing from. They need parts or a quick way to get downtown for free. If your bike is nearby and relatively easy to steal, it’s getting swiped. That’s why I think the Brits over in Cambridge (borrowing an idea from Canada) are on to something. Police have instituted a “Bike Bait” program to catch bike thieves and deter others even thinking about it.

According to The Guardian,

This tactic, also known as decoy or tracker bikes, sees police leaving badly locked, or even unlocked, bicycles in vulnerable locations. They are fitted with hidden GPS devices, letting officers trace them to the thieves, or better still to a lock-up or warehouse used by gangs to store lots of stolen bikes.

Sounds like a smart idea, right? Not everyone agrees. There are some critics who feel that the bait bike program is entrapment, arguing that the unlocked bikes are merely “an open incentive to commit crime, most notably to drug addicts or the young and impulsive.” Well alright. I fail to see the problem here. Perhaps it’s because when I see a legal term like entrapment, I immediately start looking for the requisite elements of the defense.

Entrapment is “A law-enforcement officer’s or government agent’s inducement o a person to commit a crime, by means of fraud or undue persuasion, in an attempt to later bring a criminal prosecution against that person” (Black’s Law). I don’t know how they make out the defense of entrapment in England, but here in the U.S. of A., entrapment requires two things:

1. The criminal design must orginate with law enforcement officers AND
2. The defendant was not predisposed to commit the crime.

You’ve got to have both but it’s the second requirement that is key. While folks in Cambridge are crying for the teens and drug addicts who are being lured and enticed by the police to steal bikes, but it seems to me that these people are clearly predisposed to steal bikes.

Under the law (in most U.S. jurisdictions), merely providing the opportunity for a predisposed person to commit a crime is not entrapment. If you walk past a bike, see that it’s unlocked, and decide you should walk away with it, you are predisposed to steal that shit.

When I was living in Japan, I had a bike. Tokyo is a very bike-friendly city and you find bike racks nearly everywhere you go. You rarely find bikes outfitted with locks above the flimsy wheel locks that come standard on just about every bike in the country. People, including myself, didn’t think too hard about leaving their bike unlocked outside because bike theft is not that big of a problem there. Theft in general is not a big issue in Tokyo. According to the rationale of English critics, bikes should be missing left and right over in Japan, but they’re not. Unless you already are the type of person to steal a bike, passing an unlocked/poorly locked Huffy on the street is not going to make you take it. I’m not buying it.

The funniest criticism of the bait bike program is this one from a college student who, after getting wasted at the club, decided to “borrow” a bike to get home. Unfortunately, he snatched a GPS – strapped bait bike:

I think that this is a honeypot trap of the most wasteful kind, and should not be a method of catching the gangs of bike thieves that doubtless exist – it’s striking at the bottom rung of the ladder, and this always proves ineffective.

Lookey here bloke, you can’t “borrow” a bike and then get mad because the police caught you “borrowing” it without permission. In my country we call that stealing. Next time catch a cab.

"It was a set up! I was entrapped!"

You might feel a little sorry for the drunk guy, the druggie, or lil Latarian Milton out to do hoodrat stuff with his friends because they were just opportunists and not “professionals.” This was the distinction made on Treehugger regarding the goal of the Cambridge program to catch the big fish criminals who run garages filled with stolen bikes. Call them whatever you like, opportunist or professional. If I ever find out who stole my bikes allthroughout elementary and middle school, I’m not going to stop and ask how they want to be classified.

What do you think? Good idea or a trap?  (This is a trick question. Don’t say trap, I just explained to you why it wasn’t a trap)

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