Why PALS Bought a Bait Bike | Combatting Bike theft in North Hollywood

Bike theft in North Hollywood is one of the most common property crimes in the East Valley. It is also one of the hardest to work. A stolen bike leaves almost nothing behind, having no plate, no VIN most owners have written down, and often no witness.

At one point the board approved the purchase of a bicycle, described in our records as mid-value, to be fitted with a GPS tracker and used as a bait vehicle.

Why bike theft in North Hollywood is hard to work

The bicycle is left in a place where bicycles get taken. If it is taken, the tracker shows where it went.

That is the whole design. It was a piece of equipment bought with the expectation that it will be stolen, which is not how a municipal purchasing process is built to think about buying things.

The same funding cycle covered GPS trackers for vehicles under surveillance. Different problem, but the same category of need: tools that are useful, inexpensive relative to almost anything else a division buys, and difficult to get approved through normal channels.

Why the Division came to PALS

A bait bicycle is not standard issue. It does not replace anything, it is not covered by an existing line item, and its value is hard to argue on paper before it has done anything.

It is also cheap. That combination proves clearly useful, small enough to be overlooked, awkward to categorize and describes most of what North Hollywood PALS ends up funding.

We have covered breaching tools, training meals, and a screen for the Watch Commander for the same reason. Not because the Division was denied those things, but because getting them through a City budget would have taken longer than it took to ask us.

How we decide

We fund what the Division asks for. The requests that come to us are usually the ones that are too small, too specific, or too odd to survive a budget cycle.

North Hollywood PALS is an all-volunteer board. Every dollar raised stays inside the North Hollywood Division.

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