12 hours ago
Police in one Colorado city work with community partners, repurpose stolen bikes for those in need
Bike thefts are a bigger problem than you might think. Nearly 150,000 bikes were reportedly stolen across the country last year, and it's rare that an owner gets their bike back. A law enforcement department in the Denver metro area has started a program that hopes to solve an issue that has resulted from all of that theft.
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The Wheat Ridge Police Department is not necessarily a very large police department, and when they come across bikes -- be they part of an investigation for evidence, whether it's because they are stolen or whether they're just found in unclaimed property -- they find themselves with too many bikes and nowhere to put them. In an attempt to fix that issue, they've partnered up with a couple of community organizations that are taking those bikes and giving them back to the community.
Steve Selly works for the city of Wheat Ridge and is part of the group that loads up the bikes and gets them to the community groups.
"It seems like there have been more and more bikes available over the course of the last, I'd say, two to three years," he said.
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Kelly Blinn is part of one those community groups, and said the bikes sometimes go to students.
"This can help us connect high school students or, you know, people who can't afford a bike without access to transportation," Blinn said.
Wheat Ridge police spokesman Alex Rose said bikes are becoming a more common item picked up by police departments across the Denver metro area, and there's a question of what to do with them.
"This is the best thing that we can do with these bikes and this property in general, to put it to good use," he said.
"You collect a lot of evidence through the course of all of these hundreds and thousands of investigations that happen throughout the course of the year," said Rose.
Rose said he's proud of the program that gets bikes back into the community and out of police storage.
"We need to find homes for them, and so the more relationships that we have with folks in the community that are interested in transportation and interested in giving these bikes some TLC and giving them to families who really need them, or sending them to places where they could go to good use, that's a win win for everybody," he said.
Rose says there are some things bike owners can do in the unfortunate case that a bike were to get stolen.
"Write down that serial number, because if your bike gets lost or it gets stolen, that is a key to report that to your local law enforcement agency," Rose said.
When the serial number of a stolen bike is shared with police, if it ends up in another Colorado municipality, there's a chance that serial number is going to pop up on another jurisdiction's database. That means there's a better chance a stolen bike might be found, even if it's not in the town or city it was stolen from.
