Stolen bikes

So I'm back from a 5 hour stake-out of Bricklane market earlier this morning. Boring as fuck but quite illuminating. Lots of bikes being sold for pennies with people able to easily haggle them down for a quick sale - if you had absolutely no scruples and a grand to spare then you could mop up most of it, disassemble them and make a fortune on eBay.

Sclater street mostly had crackheads and strays pushing beat up racers / mountain bikes / hybrids. They don't seem to have much organisation or association to the stalls and only have one bike at a time each, leaving it propped up against a railing or curb and stood by a couple metres back so that - I assume - they can deny ownership if the police come by. Once a bike has been sold they pop off for a bit and return with another. There were a few teenagers flogging mountain bikes in the same way earlier in the day - so my guess is this is the "n00b" method.

In the Southern carpark to the Western corner seems to be the hotter gear - a steady stream of sketchier guys bringing in fixies with gold anodising, track wheels etc. They kept them in a sort of melange in the middle of the pathway between those stalls selling loads of CatEye lights and framed by old bangers - again I assume mostly so that they can fall back and deny ownership should the police pay a visit. It was also between these guys that an argument broke out earlier in the day around 7am ("fat f*cking black c*nt" shouted and a tool brandished).

In the Northern car-park are what appear to be legitimate sellers - they have those vans and neat lines of bike racks holding their wares. Impossible to say what proportion are stolen or second hand, but some of the prices on them are quite dodgy (£160 for a high-end hybrid with hydraulic brakes?). One guy appeared to be into repainting them, covering them in a bit of polystyrene foam and flogging them as brand new.

It turned out there were a fair few others there looking for their stolen steed, and some camaraderie developed between us mourning bike-widows as we stood around watching business churn on. Conceivably the thieves would be wary of people doing this, or maybe try to intimidate people out of it, but there was neither - my guess is simply because they act with impunity and little risk of culpability regardless.

What is frustrating is that surely with a bit more police time or organisation from cyclists this shit could be stopped? I'm told the police are active, but the cynic in me says they could swing by any time, grab a few bikes and maintain the approved statistics on recovered bicycles for whatever politics it is that drive their budget (likely suffering from cuts). As the day went on I was tempted to take photos of the more blatantly stolen bikes so that I could post them up here and it not be a wasted day, but I didn't fancy my chances angering people who - in the police's own words - would probably stab you.

Bike theft seems to be a massive problem that affects us all. So is there not something we could organise around? A hashtag or repository for photos / descriptions of bikes you see being sold on the street?

Even if I'd saved or memorised all the bikes from the last 4 pages I'd still struggle to identify them in the chaos of the market. Yet if I had managed to photograph the bikes and let the community have at it - maybe someone who got their bike nicked last night would in few days time get pointed toward this thread and see.