9:30am | I think it’s safe to say that police in Long Beach and elsewhere frown upon theft of all sorts. And maybe the LBPD is doing everything it can to combat the bike theft that is rampant in this city.
All I have to offer is my one little story of how a concerned citizen brought a potential bike thief to the LBPD’s attention, and how months later the guy is still out there selling bike after bike on craigslist, without the department responding to proffers of further information and repeated follow-up inquires.
Cast your thoughts back to the year 2011. It’s late August, and your humble storyteller was in the process of shopping for a cheap bicycle to bring to Burning Man, when he came across a craigslist ad offering bikes for sale. You can read that story here, but the short version is that the guy who’d placed the ad had five bikes in his otherwise near-empty apartment garage and was selling three of them, saying that once upon a time they had all been his personal bikes. The whole set-up — even the fact that each bike came with its own helmet (do most bike riders have a separate helmet for each bike?) — didn’t strike me as dubious until a couple of days later I saw an ad by the same guy offering two bikes for sale, neither of which had been in the garage just days earlier. I didn’t contact the police at the time, feeling unsure (as most civil libertarians would, I imagine) there was enough reasonable suspicion to warrant doing so.
What I did do was resolve to check craigslist occasionally to see whether this fellow continued to have a replenishing superfluity of bikes for sale.
You know where this is going. I was barely unpacked from Burning Man when I came across yet another ad by the same guy, with yet more bikes for sale. As always, they were in the $40-$80 price range. But this time there were kids’ bikes, too.
And so, unsure if I was doing the right thing, I contacted the LBPD, saying: here’s what I experienced, and here’s a link to the new ad. I received an immediate reply from the LBPD’s Investigations Bureau. “Thank you[,] Mr. Moore for you[r] email in regards to potential bike thefts,” it said. “I have forwarded this information to the detectives and sergeant in the burglary detail. We appreciate your observation and report of this incident.”
Before too long an officer called and left a message on my answering machine. I couldn’t make out his name, but he left a phone number and asked me to call back. I did so the next day and left a voicemail. I left another voicemail a few of days later. Then another a week after that.
But no one returned my call.
On October 7 I e-mailed the Investigations Bureau officer and let her know I’d been leaving messages, but that no one was calling me back — and again I got an immediate reply guessing that it was one of two officers who had called me (since that was to whom the information I’d provided had been passed along). By this time (I explained in a reply e-mail) I had misplaced the number I’d gotten from my answering machine.
But this time I didn’t get even an e-mail reply.
I might have let it go, but I couldn’t resist checking craigslist now and again. I can’t say I was all that surprised to find another new ad. “Hi,” I wrote to the Investigations Bureau officer on November 21. “Just wondering whatever happened with this. I see that this guy continues to post ads with new bikes (ex.:http://losangeles.craigslist.org/lgb/bik/2710727904.html). Have you guys checked him out and found him to be clean?”
You know perfectly well what happened next: no reply.
I was at a loss. What do you do when you provide the police with information about a potential ongoing crime, and they decline to let you know what’s going on?
I might have done nothing, but craigslist curiosity draws me back now and again. And here at the start of 2012, there it is: yet another new ad by the same guy.
By my sporadic count this fellow who had five bikes in his apartment garage in August — only three of which were for sale, and all of which he said had been his personal bikes — has placed ads for at least 20 bikes, including several children’s bikes.
Hey, it’s absolutely possible that this guy is completely on the level, starting out by selling three of his five personal bikes, then liking the process so much that over the intervening months he’s kept legitimately acquiring bicycles to sell at roughly $60 apiece.
And perhaps the police really shouldn’t inform concerned citizens who report ongoing potential crimes (and asking for follow-up) of the investigative results.
I don’t have the answers. I just hope they looked into this one.