A determined thief encountered a bike fastened to a rack — so he ripped the rack from the ground.
A nearby surveillance camera captured the episode. A video started making the rounds of East Rock block-watchers Wednesday. (Click above to watch it.)
It was one of two similar heavy-lifting attempted bike thefts to occur within a day of each other in the “Sohu” — south of Humphrey Street — enclave of East Rock. In the other incident, the thieves failed in the end to ride off with the prize.
Taken together, the two incidents offer a cautionary tale for cyclists looking to hang onto their bikes in the city, according to Sohu’s block watch captain, Lisa Seidlarz.
“People need to lock their bikes through the frame AND tires!” she wrote in a group email to her neighbors. If bikes are locked that way, it’s harder for thieves to ride off on them, even if they can uproot a bike rack.
The incident captured in the video occurred at Nash and Lawrence streets on June 25 at 6:18 p.m. The sun hadn’t even started setting yet. In full public view, the thief tugged and tugged at a bicycle, which was chained around its frame to the rack.
Finally the thief pried the whole rack out of the ground. The lock slipped off. The thief rode away.
“Street signs are even easier to get out of the ground,” Siedlarz noted in her email message.
Lt. Herb Sharp, the neighborhood’s top cop, said he knows of no similar recent bike theft involving a ripped-out rack. (It’s unclear from the video whether the thief slipped off the rack after the rack fell over, or whether the chain may have broken open.)
The day before, on June 24, two young men tried to steal a bike from a back yard on Pleasant Street at around 2 a.m., Siedlarz reported Tuesday.
The rattling woke up someone in the house, who described the incident this way to Siedlarz:
“I awoke to loud metal banging and saw two young males at the back porch … in the process of stealing one of two bikes locked to the metal railing of the back porch. Before I could get my camera or phone to call the police, they had kicked the metal rung apart and took an old style road bike that was cable-locked to the railing and fled. …
“The one that kicked the railing loose, retrieved his small, low-seated bike from the lawn and rode away. The other took the stolen bike and they both exited the driveway. The stolen bike was dropped at the end of the driveway because it couldn’t be ridden as mentioned above. It was confirmed today that the bike in the driveway was indeed the one taken from the porch.”
In this case, Siedlarz said, the owner had cable-locked both the frame and the front tire of the bike — and that made the difference.
gentrification would fix this problem.