Petition to stop bike sales at Santa Cruz flea market


Mr T and bikes

Steve Schlicht, the man behind this online database of stolen bikes in Santa Cruz, wants the Santa Cruz flea market to stop selling bikes, believing that moving the market from stolen bikes away from the flea market will cut down on the rampant bike theft problem we have around here.

Steve has an online petition here for the local Goodwill Industries, which runs the Skyview Flea Market on Soquel Drive.

Santa Cruz law enforcement periodically sweep the flea market and check bike serial numbers against their database of stolen bikes.

Photo is from the Santa Cruz Bike Church several years ago.

One Comment

  1. Sooooo… How many stolen bikes does the SCPD find at the Flea Market?

    As a Santa Cruz resident I can say that the joker with the petition is a loose cannon and serial site creator who also creates sites such a cleanupsantacruz.org which vilifies the homeless…. Something dear to the local newspaper’s heart when they aren’t blaming the Mexican community

    Here’s the real deal…

    In my almost 40 years in Santa Cruz I have unwittingly witnessed two thefts of bikes locked to racks. In one instance outside a local coffee house, the fellow looked like a tall skinny neatly groomed college student, and the other case just last year outside a local junk jewelry store the gent was wearing a mechanic’s jacket with his name on it (which I gave to the police) and looked as if he IS a mechanic.

    The one who stole MY bike a number of years ago from a rack near where I worked was employed by a nearby business and when I found it on an outbound bus a week later the police WOULD NOT LET ME show them identifying features that were hidden.

    NEXT TIME, I’m simply going to “steal” my property back using the excuse for inaction the SCPD officer used; “Possession is 9/10s of the law”.

    Look, there are people with ALL THE TOOLS and trucks who come from the central valley and elsewhere to steal bikes in Santa Cruz (happens every year in the spring and again in the fall when the UC students show up with their expensive bikes) and sell them elsewhere, and the bikes from there come here for sale. It’s a BIG business. like car chop shops, that a city bike license offers NO PROTECTION WHATSOEVER against because NO California city contacts other cities with stolen bikes found, and there IS NO state database of stolen bikes. IOW if your bike leaves the city… perhaps the county as well, your bike ‘license’ means squat.

    Bike licenses issued by California cities are simply nuisance fees and should be ignored until there’s a state database like a car registration database, allowing recovery of your vehicle.

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