And here we go again: in Portland in the USA someone has repeatedly stolen their own bike without being challenged, as reported by Williamette Week:
If you saw a man on Hawthorne liberating a bike with 2-foot bolt cutters, would you intervene? Say something? Call the cops? You may think so, but we say fat chance…
That's right, we committed seven bike thefts in broad daylight in busy, public places and no one tried to stop us or even called the police.
The first two were staged just around the corner from each other:
Unbeknownst to the bystanders to this theft, Silverman had done the same thing less than 15 minutes earlier one block away. If one of the people who watched him steal the bike outside Lincoln Hall at the corner of Mill and Broadway had called campus security or the police, maybe the second theft could have been thwarted.
The article also includes a pretty good overview of the Bystander Effect.
From the comments to the article, a few interesting thoughts emerge:
If an Hispanic or African-American young man had been told to just meddle with bikes…the results would have been quite different…Portland is a city in which white, middle-class people can do pretty much anything they wannt. The rest of us have to be very, very careful.
Quite. How different would this be? I reckon it's only a matter of time before this variation is put to the test.
I really don't see the point of putting myself in harms way for a possession. Even in police classes, which I have attened for defense, they teach you to let them have the replacable thing. Helping a human to me is toatally different.
Yeah, you've got to concede the sense of that point.
If anything, you've just shown potential theives how easy it is to steal bikes in broad daylight: just fiddle around, look and act like it is your bike.
Bollocks. If bike thieves don't know this already, they could work it out pretty easily without help from a newspaper article or video.
He stole his own bike so he gave off no "nervous tension" that a person can pick up on.
This theme comes up repeatedly in the comments and it's rubbish. Do people really think thieves go around looking nervous and shifty? And do they all look like strung out crackheads? I'd suggest not. Clean-cut middle class uni students nick stuff too (they just don't go to jail because their parents hire expensive lawyers to defend them).
Comparing bike theft to murder? That's serious hyperbole.
The story doesn't actually compare bike theft to the murder of Kitty Genovese, the point is that social psychologists argue that the bystander effect is at play in both. I didn't read that they were putting bike theft on the same degree of severity as murder.
And there's an anecdote that supports my earlier suggestion on how to act in this situation:
I actually stopped some kids from stealing a bike once…I pretended it was my bike and went ape-shit on them, saying I was calling the cops and that they better run. They were just stupid teenage kids, they ran off, and I asked around about the bike at the bar. The owner was so happy that he promised me a reward, but no reward ever came.
How about that, hey?
[via C.I.C.L.E.]