I left my bike locked to a lamp post previous Thursday, then I left with my boat to sleep by anchor. It’s quite risky to lock the bike to a lamp post on a public place in Norway, bike thefts are quite common. I was using a cheap lock with a digit combination rather than a key, those locks are quite unreliable - but it’s not so much of a point to spend lots of money on a “proper” lock, I believe that with a handheld battery-driven angle grinder any lock can be cut. What I do have is a tracker on the bike. The tracker is specially made for bikes, it’s quite expensive, locked to the service provided by the vendor, and it even has a quite high yearly service fee to be paid. But the good thing, this service fee includes 100% payback insurance should the bike get stolen. That’s something. (If you’re interessted, it’s from bikefinder - but I must say, I was very underimpressed at first, my first tracker simply didn’t work, and it took them more than a month and quite some communication forth and back before they would admit the problem and send me a new tracker).

As I dragged up the anchor next day, I checked the bikefinder app to see if my bike was still where I left it - and it was not. It was located some kilometers away.

I immediately reported the bike as stolen through the app, and got called back from customer service. They said the bike had been moved around 23 the previous night, asked me to go out there, see if I could locate the bike or get a bluetooth connection to it, and then call the police. Unfortunately it was a super stressed day both with my work and some other appointments, so it took several hours before I managed to do anything. Since I was moored up close to the police station I thought it was a better idea to visit the police station and file a report first. I also didn’t quite want to risk locating my bike on some thiefs property, calling the police and then learn that “we’ll send someone as soon as we can … probably today, possibly tomorrow”.

There was movement on the bike, the bikefinder representative called me and said I should probably wait for the bike to come to a standstill before searching for it, as it most likely was parked inside a van. A new address showed up in the application:

When being at the police station (Sandvika), the bike was located outside a shop right nearby (Jula), and there was a police patrol right nearby, so they went and picked it up. I’m not sure if they considered waiting for someone to come out from the Jula shop. Possibly the thief, or someone buying the bike from the thief was shopping for tools or materials to fix the bike, possibly the thief had discovered the tracking device and decided to just drop the bike somewhere.

I didn’t recognize the bike at all when I met the police, it was modified, assumingly with the intent that the owner should not recognize it. The bike that got stolen was black - the bike I saw was black, white and red. The police officer was not wearing a uniform, so I had to check the app to verify that it was really my bike.

In addition they had also put plenty of oil around the wheels and on the chain - including the braking discs! The brakes was squeeking, a problem I haven’t had time to fix yet (I’ll try to get it done today). Adding oil to the disc was certainly the very wrong fix for it, but indeed it did a quick and easy job to stop the bike from being noisy.

Later I went back to Jula to buy a new bike lock. I was considering to lock the bike to the same lamp post again … but, maybe not such a good idea :-)

Update: I’ve always meant that if one is a victim of a crime, one should have a low barrier for reporting it to the police - it may be good to have it documented, it may be good for general statistics on crime, and it may be good for the police to have information in the archive (for instance if they get more bike theft reports connected to the same address, it may be a good idea to investigate). Apparently the police seems to be of another opinion - they insisted my police report should go directly into the thrash can since the bike was found and returned.

(This was also posted at Hive)