A while ago I heard about an interesting initiative to try and prevent bicycles from being stolen in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, which has long had a reputation for being less wealthy and more crime-ridden than other municipalities. This reputation is somewhat undeserved, and it’s also worth bearing in mind that a significant proportion of bicycle thefts in Japan are perpetrated not by organised thieves who scratch off the serial numbers and sell the stolen bicycles on EBay, but tired office workers who can’t be bothered to walk home from the station when they get off the train after an evening out drinking with their colleagues.
But anyway, some police forces in the U.S. employ so-called bait cars, which are designed to trick thieves into stealing them. These cars are fitted with hidden cameras and can be remotely controlled to stop the engine and lock the doors, thereby catching the criminals red-handed. Loosely based on this idea, in 2017, the authorities in Amagasaki began to experiment with the black and yellow lock-type gizmo attached to a bicycle wheel in the below YouTube video.
As demonstrated in the video, which features some amusingly poor acting and disguise skills, when the prospective thief first fiddles with the dummy bike, the gizmo sounds an initial beeping noise. Then, if he (or she – let’s not assume that all bad guys are guys) continues trying to take the bike, there follows an alarm that’s loud enough to attract the attention of everyone within a 50-metre radius, at which point, he or she is very likely to give up.
(The quieter and louder alarms are actually depicted in the wrong order in this video, but you’ll get the idea if you watch it.)
Initially, these bikes were planted in three locations in Amagasaki as part of a three-month trial. The trial must have been effective, because two years later, it was reported that the city’s target for reducing the number of thefts had been achieved three years early – incidents peaked at about 2,900 in 2023 and were still common in 2016 at 2,300. By 2019, however, this figure had fallen to around 1,500, and apparently, the city’s next target was fewer than 1,000 by 2022.
Amagasaki was the first place in Japan to try this technique, which went under the code name ‘Alarmee’, and unfortunately, it would appear to have been the last, as I can find no further evidence of its use after the follow-up articles detailing how successful it had been.
I’ve seen prank videos in which bait bikes are inconspicuously tied to lampposts so that prospective thieves topple to the ground when the rope pulls tight, or whose frames are rigged to collapse almost as soon as they start moving. In contrast, Alarmee is an authentic, practical, and deceptively simple technique that could prevent a lot of bicycles from going missing, so I wonder why it never caught on…
(Incidentally, the sign pinned to a bike basket in the photo at the top of this post says, ‘If you try to steal this bicycle, an alarm will sound’, which rather gives the game away and was, I assume, for promotional purposes only.)
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