Section of the Springwater where the incident occurred.

While riding on the Springwater Corridor path in the early morning of May 10th, someone knocked Portland resident Vincent Rodarte off his bike. The impact caused him to lose consciousness. When he woke up, his custom-built mountain bike was gone.

“The details on that still elude me,” Rodarte wrote on the Oregon Bicycle Racing Association email list where he first reported the incident.

It happened between 12:30 and 3:00 am at the intersection where the Springwater passes SE Tacoma and 32nd streets (map).

Rodarte is appealing to the community to look out for his bike in hopes that it can be recovered. He’s filed a police report and has been in contact with a with PPB Bike Theft Task Force member who has already begun searching the area. Rodarte got a tip that his bike was spotted under I-405 and NW 19th, but so far police haven’t been able to get it back.
[Read more…]

The first of a new generation — and hopefully a new era of bike theft prevention.
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

The City of Portland just raised their game when it comes to providing people with a secure place to park a bicycle.
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The shop is in the process of moving to a larger location.
(Photo: Kenton Cycle Repair)

Kenton Cycle Repair has had a very rough start to the week. Around 6:00 am Monday morning two men broke into the shop and stole nine bikes and a large amount of new inventory off the shelves.

The shop is located at 2020 N McClellan Street, just off Denver Avenue in downtown Kenton. According to @pdxalerts (not official) the suspects were driving a blue Chevrolet pickup.

The shop’s owner Rich Walker confirmed the details of eight of the stolen bikes with us yesterday. The total retail value of the bikes is around $4,750. Walker said the thieves also made out with “all our lights and locks and a large amount of repair parts.”

Walker said the thieves busted out the front door. When he arrived around 8:15 there was glass all over the floor. A witness from the Kenton Hotel Apartments across the street saw two men in a truck loaded with bikes and called 911; but they drove away before police arrived. The witness was able to share a description of the men and a partial license plate number.
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Owner of RecumbentPDX says the stolen trike is one of only 12 or so on the entire west coast.

An rare electric-assist recumbent trike was stolen in downtown Portland over the weekend. It belongs to someone who is physically disabled. Mel Birgé, owner of RecumbentPDX in southeast Portland, is offering $500 for its return.

Here’s more from Mel:

An HP Scorpion Plus Pedelec was stolen. It looks virtually-identical to the one in the attached picture (the stolen one is tan color and has a larger 26” wheel in the rear). The trike has a Go SwissDrive electric motor in the rear wheel.

The owner is disabled by a brain tumor and this is his primary recreation.
[Read more…]

Size is just one reason this product has potential.
(Photos: Bryan Hance/The Bike Index)

BikePortland subscriber and resident bike theft expert Bryan Hance from The Bike Index checked out the Iota Tracker with an eye towards bike tracking, DIY hacking, and more.

We field a lot of questions about ‘bike trackers’ at the Bike Index – everybody wants a small, affordable GPS tracker for their bike. Sounds like a simple request; but many people are surprised to learn a product like this doesn’t exist yet.

There are a few basic reasons why trackers aren’t as great as you think:

Size/hideability — It is hard to disguise a tracker so thieves can’t instantly find it. And having something that uses several antennas (GPS and cellular) means they aren’t easily hidden – nor are they very small.

Reliance on cellular — Most trackers use the cellular network to report their location, which means most trackers are 50% cell phone parts – and means paying for cell data, supporting a SIM card, having a hefty battery, etc.
[Read more…]

This post is by Portlander Bryan Hance.

Bike Index is very excited to announce a new partner in our fight against bike theft: LeadsOnline.com!

LeadsOnline runs the nation’s largest online investigation system used by thousands of law enforcement officers to monitor pawn shop and secondhand retailer transactions. Pawn shops across the country report their transactions to LeadsOnline in order to comply with local laws – and police use the site’s tools to search for, identify, and recover stolen goods from their own local police reports.
[Read more…]

The Craigslist post (still up as of today) said the bike was, “Recently bought for me as a gift but I’m not much into bicycle riding.”

Northwest Portland resident Tina Penman is feeling very grateful for the Portland Police Bureau today. After her bike got stolen on Monday she set up a Craiglist sting with an officer who rolled up just in time to bust the thief.

In the interest of educating others about how to prevent and recover a stolen bike, we asked Tina to share how it all went down. Here’s her story…

With the rain and winds late last week into this past weekend, I took a 5-day hiatus from riding my bike. On Monday night, I popped down to my building’s private courtyard to say hi (who doesn’t miss their bike after a 5-day hiatus?) and see how it was doing. I live in an apartment complex in the Pearl and you need a fob to gain access to this area. To my unpleasant surprise, it was no longer there. I had it locked using a Kryptonite Chain Combination Lock in a well-lit area next to two other bikes (one was my husband’s) that remain unscathed.

I immediately hit up my husband and a couple friends to ask for advice. My bike had a Tile tracker attached to seat and I wasn’t sure how it would work in a situation where my bike could be anywhere. Tile utilizes a Bluetooth connection so you have to be in very close proximity for an item with a Tile attached to be found. I hopped in a Zipcar, drove real slow around some popular camps in PDX in hopes my Tile app would capture my bike, but no such luck. After driving around for an hour, I realized it was like searching for a needle in a haystack so I called it quits and went home.
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This duo was arrested on multiple charges.
(Photos: Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office)

We’ve covered many bike theft stories over the years; but we’ve never heard of anything quite like what we learned from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office this morning.

A 13-year-old girl in Cedar Hills (seven miles west of Portland) called the police to report a bicycle that she suspected was stolen. The amazing thing is that the bike was given to her by her mother and she told the responding officer it was probably stolen. She was right. She also disclosed that her mom had forced her to steal all sorts of things from apartment complexes and donation drop-off locations.

Deputies investigated and found out that the girl’s mom — 33-year-old Beaverton resident Lara Kent and her partner, 37-year-Jack Harman Jr. from Portland — had a U-haul van and a storage unit stuffed with stolen goods. They tracked down the van and the storage unit and ultimately arrested the duo.

Among the 70 stolen items recovered were jewelry, checks, mail, license plates, new clothing, 10 bicycles and one electric scooter that belonged to Portlander Cheryl Evans.
[Read more…]

Joshua Dutcherson.
(Photo: PPB)

The Portland Police Bureau has nabbed another big-time thief who has a taste for high-end bicycles.

The PPB worked with officers from the Bike Theft Task Force and task force partner BikeIndex.org to arrest Joshua Dutcherson last Thursday. The 32-year-old suspect is being held in connection with three burglaries of apartment complex garages where he’s accused of lifting “numerous bicycles.”

Here’s how it went down, via the official police statement about the case:

The Bike Index website (https://bikeindex.org/) was instrumental in identifying some of the stolen bikes. An off-duty detective saw a suspicious van with three high end racing bikes the week prior and took note of the plate and the driver. While officers were investigating some new bike thefts the detective recognized the suspect and the vehicle as the same one he had seen a week prior…[Read more…]

PPB Officers Dave Sanders (right) and Ben Labasan on the Springwater Path Saturday.
(Photos: Portland Police Bureau)

Leaders of the Portland Police Bureau’s Bike Theft Task Force did a ride-along on the Springwater Corridor path on Saturday.

The ride was a spontaneous event that founder of the Task Force, PPB Officer Dave Sanders, posted to Twitter just a few hours before he set out. He was joined by fellow Officer Ben Labasan and the two of them were joined by a handful of citizens who showed up to ride with them. It was all part of the Bike Theft Task Force’s ongoing effort to involve the community in the work they are doing to prevent bike theft and recover stolen bikes.

Why the Springwater? “I’ve been wanting to see the issues along the Springwater firsthand and have been wanting to address some of the ongoing tips and complaints that we have received regarding bike theft in this area,” Ofcr Sanders said via email this morning.

Here’s more from Sanders:[Read more…]