Bait Bike Leads Police to Secret Bike Chop Shop

19 Jan 2016

At Reed College, bike thefts have become a big issue and police have begun a bait bike program to combat the issue.

The bikes are equipped with GPS tracking devices in the hopes that they would be led to whoever was stealing the bikes. What they found, however, seemed too bizarre to be true.

In an abandoned Southeast Portland home, they found a secret room with a chop shop hidden inside.

When this campaign was started by Reed in the 2014 – 2015 school year, and the GPS tracker showed one of the bait bikes being taken off campus.

And Reed’s security officers, with the help of the Portland Police, were able to track the bike a couple miles from the campus to the home with the secret room. An officer said he noticed an odd looking book case and found a hidden door behind it. The hidden door led to a secret room.

According to Kevin Myers, Reed College’s spokesman, “It’s pretty wild”. He says it felt like something you would see out of a ‘Scooby-Doo’ plot rather than at a sleepy liberal arts college.

Myers says that he thinks bike thieves found the college to be a simple place to steal bikes and in a matter of seconds they would just cut locks and come in.

Nobody had an idea where the bikes were ending up after being stolen, until now. Police have since shut down the chop shop.

Although police did arrest one man for trespassing, they could not prove if that person was responsible for the stolen bike operation.

Each day in the city, bikes are stolen, says Portland police. It’s an addiction fueled problem with parts from the stolen bikes being sold in exchange for drugs.

According to Nano Douglass, Community Safety Field Manager, the Portland Police Bureau were not that supportive in the program in the beginning despite the fact that other stolen bikes were being found, but they did eventually warm up to it.

The intent of the program is not to just bust thieves, says Reed’s director of community safety, Gary Granger. The intent is to convince potential thieves looking to steal bikes that this college is not the place to do it.

Both staff and students at Reed report 30 to 40 stolen bikes annually. The hope is that through the use of GPS tracker, the bike thefts will be reduced or eliminated all together.


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