Last year we wrote an investigative piece on the insidious problem of bike theft in Denver. In the Mile-High City alone there are thousands of bikes stolen every year — and not just cheap old cruisers either. Bike thieves are absconding with badass mountain bikes, slick road bikes and styling townies — they’re stealing bikes that are worth anywhere from several hundred, to several thousand dollars, and then either chopping, selling or trading them.

Which equates to millions of dollars in stolen bike property annually. Just in Denver.

That’s no simple homeless operation. There seems to be something more organized going on in Denver. People working on their own, targeting bikes one at a time; people working together to target a number of them at once; groups scouring the city, opportunistically to find easy bikes to steal; and expert criminal burglars running full-on heist operations on performance bike shops.

It’s a problem. And as this Tesla video proves, it can happen really fast if you leave your bike in the wrong place — even if it’s locked up.

Caught red handed you filthy thief! No doubt the Denver bike theft police team is already working hard on this case, trying to ID the guy, and track those stolen road bikes down, to return them to their owners.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

However, even though the Denver Police Department actually does have a team dedicated specifically to bike theft, none of that is actually going to happen. Even with video evidence, even though the thief didn’t use a mask and his face is clearly visible, even though this would be a relatively simple case to crack, the very most DPD is going to do is take a report. Which will get filed away with all the rest of them, and unless these bikes are registered with the city, they’re more than likely gone forever.

The Denver police do not give a shit about bike theft — there’s too much of it, and they can’t stop the problem at its source, the argue. It would take too much time and too many resources to curb Denver’s bike theft problem. Which thieves like this one know for a fact. It’s no secret that Denver PD won’t pursue bike theft crime — which is only contributing to the problem.