Honestly fair enough, bikes do get stolen a lot. But I kind of think it’s still less than how much the stories of stolen bikes get popularized. Anecdotally me and mine have always had such old crappy basic bikes that nobody has bothered. I keep mine in front of my door outside and my racist neigbours have told me many times how I shouldn’t and how it will get stolen by immigrants. They told me that I shouldn’t even put flowers by my front door because those will get stolen for sure.

At this point my bike has stood by the door a year, same as my flower pots. And if someone is in such a dire need of a bike or a flower pot, I think I’ll live.

When I did community gardening the racist boomers there told me to not even leave a bucket at my plot because “the russian women steal even soil”. Then I ran out of spoons and forgot all my stuff on the plot for two years, went to see it this spring and all my crap was still there.😂

But yeah, this is more about the mindset of “this is known” and how it feeds things like racism. I think this is why the media loves making a big deal of those anecdotal events and then they seem common. When they in fact are not.

Another anecdotal story about this. There are cows on pasture in my city, always has been. I took a pic of them and sent it to my family chat. The first question was “don’t people hurt them”. There’s been maybe one or two stories about people being dumb and harassing some pasturing sheep near an urban area or something and it was all over the news as an example of “human nature as evil”. And now it’s common knowledge. Of course the cows are ok and people just love them, nobody hurts them. But this is a good example of what I am trying to say. It’s the Parenti “Gaddafi is in your house”-rant applied to all things news.