Somewhere in the last year or so I read an article arguing that the reason bike theft is so attractive is that although the reward (to the thief) of the crime is small, the risk is practically zero. The suggestion was that if the police managed to successfully investigate and prosecute even a small fraction of bike thefts, they could increase the risk to the thief by several orders of magnitude. Since the reward is s…
What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?
At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders.
What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate.
Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory.
If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.