Los Angeles City Council voted 11-3 Tuesday in favor of a new law that would target people who sell and repair used bikes in public without a permit. The ordinance targets bicycle thieves who live outside and critics say it unfairly targets homeless people.

Bicycle “chop shops” are relatively common in Portland. We’ve reported on Portland Police Bureau investigations in the past where known criminals were stripping down stolen bikes into stacks of separate parts in order to profit off the sale of the bikes and/or to anonymize the bikes and prevent them from being recovered by theft victims or police.

But there’s a wide spectrum of bicycle activity in homeless camps. Many people who live on the street rely on bikes to get around. And just like people with houses and garages, they have a right to own more than one bike, to fix them, and to sell them to other people. There’s also the right to remain innocent until proven guilty, which is one reason I didn’t refer to a camp on SE Alder Street as a ‘chop shop’ in a story last month.

When we reported on how tricky this issue is for Portland Police Bureau officers to navigate back in 2013, Sergeant Brian Hughes said, “Just because they’re living outside and have a lot of bikes, doesn’t mean they’re bike thieves. They’re entitled to work on a bike just as much as anyone anywhere else.”

L.A. City Council added language to their ordinance to make sure the law doesn’t catch innocent people, but laws enforced by police against vulnerable people have a way of being abused and unfairly implemented. It’s also worth noting that L.A.’s effort is championed by a politician who ran for office on a platform of removing homeless encampments from public places.

Here’s the salient text of the ordinance:

Except as otherwise stated in this section, no person shall assemble, disassemble, sell, offered to sell distribute, offered to distribute or store the following items on public property within the city: • Five or more bicycle parts • A bicycle frame with the gear cables or brake cables cut • Two or more bicycles with missing bicycle parts; or three or more bicycles. The prohibitions shall not apply to:

• A person operating under a valid city business license or permit authorizing such activities. • A person in possession of a single bicycle, which is being repaired as a result of malfunction or damage that occurred while a person rode the bicycle on public property. The sole purpose of the repair shall be to restore the bicycle to its operational form and enable the person to resume riding the bicycle.

In a detailed story about the ordinance and its local political and policy context, Streetsblog LA reporter Sarah Sulaiman wrote, “It remains to be seen what enforcement of the ordinance will look like in practice.”

It also remains to be seen if Portland City Council would ever attempt something like this. Given the politics around homelessness and cycling here, I doubt we’d ever see an attempt at a similar law. But these days it’s not a good idea to predict anything when it comes to complicated issues.

Jonathan Maus is BikePortland’s editor, publisher and founder. Contact him at @jonathan_maus on Twitter, via email at maus.jonathan@gmail.com, or phone/text at 503-706-8804. Also, if you read and appreciate this site, please become a supporter.

I think your arm might be sore for patting yourself on the back at the “empathy” you show… LA has had it, Portland is getting there. Since you imply that someone living on the street could actually legally own 10 bikes, maybe they should apply that money towards some housing? If you don’t think that is a chop shop in the picture you posted, what do you think it is?

Your dedication to criticizing me and trying to shoot holes in my positions is admirable dwk.

As I’ve said 1 million times. As a journalist and person who wants to be taken seriously in our community, I will not call something a “chop shop” unless I have some proof or evidence that the bikes are stolen. I have used that term many times in the past when the police have confirmed stolen bikes being present. It’s a simple issue of wanting to be accurate and fair. It is also an issue of a slippery slope and wanting to defer to caution when the well-being of vulnerable/marginalized people are involved. Thanks for your comment.

Hilarious… the person in the picture standing by what looks like about 10 stripped bike frames is just a collector until you see proof…

I don’t see a shopping cart in the photo, but I see them in almost every camp I pass on the paths in and around Portland. The presence of a shopping cart labeled Safeway, Target, etc is, for me, proof positive that a thief is or was in the camp. It does not mean that everyone is a thief, but someone is!

Of course journalists should always assume innocence in reporting crimes. Lay out the facts bluntly and let readers draw their own conclusions. As a journalist, you do not need to call the scene that was at SE Alder a chop shop. Just show your readers the picture and accurately describe what is there, and the readers will understand what it is.

Sergeant Hughes was right to say that police likewise cannot assume guilt just by seeing. They have to investigate before acting. Nonetheless, there is good reason to ask questions of people who store a high number of bikes and bike parts out in the open on public property, especially if you are aware of how frequently bikes are stolen. Furthermore, people living on the street are not automatically entitled to be looked upon as any more vulnerable or marginalized than anyone else. These are adults who have made choices and should be expected to behave legally and with respect toward their surroundings and other people. Your lot in life does not excuse you from being a thoughtful and considerate person. If you’re a law abiding, aspiring bike entrepreneur and living on the street, your priority should be to seek proper public assistance so your operation does not become a nuisance of other people who need to use the public right of way and have to abide by the relevant city ordinances.

People living on the street have to be held responsible for themselves and their actions, not treated as mere victims of circumstance, who just get a pass cause life ain’t fair.

I think your arm might be sore for patting yourself on the back…

When someone disagrees with you, try to dispute the substance of their point without resorting to pretending to be able to read their mind.

I agree with you that “chop shop” is the obvious name for a sprawling pile of torn-apart and spray-painted bikes, but unfounded accusations of malice are tiresome.

The difference between LA and Portland is that Portland (motto: “The City that’s Woke”) has only innocent people undertaking bicycle repair on public streets. We don’t need no stinkin’ ordinance that could have a negative adverse impact on the hordes of hardworking, law-abiding, drug-free folks who just happen to be houseless because of the wealthy, property class. /s/

Maybe some examples of your ad hominem characterization of police abuse would be useful. Your stance is typical of letting the perfect stand in the way of the good. No law will ever be perfect, and I suggest that if you were serious about shutting down chop shops, you would come up with a wording that you found palatable.

Bike thieves feeling “targeted” because of a crackdown on illegal chop shops?

And no, people do not have the right to operate an unpermitted bike repair and sales business on the sidewalk or street, even if their wares are obtained in a legitimate manner. Living outdoors does not grant some magical exemption from the law.

Shutting down these operations should be straightforward, even without proving that the bikes are stolen. Just examine the paperwork that any business is required to have.

Exactly.. I am sure the local bike shops love the competition that BP thinks is fine…

I help run a (barely) “legitimate” nonprofit chop-shop operation here in Greensboro NC. We collect and process about 600 donated bicycles per year from other nonprofits, the police, individuals, churches, and so on. This year we gave away about 75 bikes to Afghan refugees plus other bikes to the homeless, the nearly homeless, inner-city black kids, and to the working poor. We also typically sell about 25 used bicycles and scrap about 200 bikes.

From my experience in working with our volunteers (I’m a volunteer too) and in meeting with other chop-shop operators (including other nonprofits but mostly illegitimate back yard operations), I’ve come to some basic conclusions about the chop-shop industry at least in pleasantly mediocre cities like Greensboro (as we are clearly not on par with lofty Portland):

There is no paperwork 

I am quite confident your non-profit has some paperwork such as a business license, tax return, etc. that establishes it as a legitimate operation.

The text of the LA law seems to make a good effort to address whether the bikes are a chop shop or a person’s used parts bin for repairing their bike. Perhaps if we had data on how big the pile needs to be to contain, say, 10% or greater stolen bikes (stolen bikes that the owner reported the theft and serial number to the police), we could craft a similar law to cut into the criminal’s business and preserve individual liberty. ALWAYS report a stolen bike BTW.

Good for LA! Now let’s start sweeps here in PDX immediately. Time to take our city back.

As long as there is a huge market demand for chop shop bikes (and chop shop cars) and no real and consistent local enforcement of the law, I don’t see how this ordinance or any other is going to do what it intended. I see no extra funding for the policing needed, so what I do see is an attempted “easy fix” of an otherwise very complex social and industrial issue.

Chop shops are ugly and a bit of an industrial blight on our streets and back yards, but they do apparently fulfill a needed market niche in our communities for cheap transportation that our bricks-and-mortar bike shops are unable or unwilling to supply – if the need wasn’t there and there was no market, why would the chop shops even exist?

The “need” exists because criminal drug addicts need a way to finance their next drug buy.

How are the drug dealers making money on stolen bikes? Who is buying them? Where are they being sold and for how much? Are sales on Craiglist, Facebook, eBay, or outside somewhere?

I can think of a lot of commodities that are easier to steal, more valuable, and easier move around than a huge clunky bike, such as cell phones, credit card receipts, and prescription drugs. Once a bike has been parted out, it’s “Bluebook” value drops from $100-$60 to its metal content of roughly $3, and most of the parts are utterly worthless.

When I see a pile of bikes on the street, I rather doubt any of them are stolen at all – most are likely other people’s trash.

If your neighbors are buying these used chop-shop bikes or their parts, then that is a completely different problem having to do fencing, pawning, online sales, and vastly overpriced new parts – in other words, the demand for this stuff rather than the supply of it. These ordinances will do nothing to abate such demand – if anything, it will merely call out the markets for it to suppliers from other communities.

You do raise an interesting point. Who are their customers? At least in Bend there is a pretty small market for reworked beater bikes. I used to live in Eugene and had multiple bikes stolen. My FSR was recovered, but the fork had been replaced with a POS and the rear suspension had been turned upside down or something. I’m sure the ‘mechanic’ was going to try to sell it, but who would want a $1000 bike converted into a $200 POS?

In the “new meth” article in the Atlantic, the author described how bike disassembly/reassembly provided good “focus work” for people spun out on gak. Perhaps there is an element of disordered thinking among those in “the business” that leads to choices that seem baffling to the sober.

Let’s legalize bicycle theft itself. If the chop shop operators trading in stolen bikes are going to have it good, so should the thieves themselves!

It’s a sensible law, hopefully we do something similar. I agree with you, Jonathan, that we shouldn’t assume guilt. But there’s also no particular reason we should tolerate businesses operating on public property without a license, even if all of their goods are legitimately acquired. If someone wants to run a bike shop, they should get a business license and do it on private property. Even then, I expect a fair number of stolen bikes go through used bike shops. It’s almost impossible to track. But requiring that bike shops operate on private property with a business license creates a barrier to entry for the worst/most unethical dealers, and it’s a concept worth supporting.

Good. Bike thieves suck. I think we need to stop doing mental gymnastics around these piles of stripped bikes claiming they were all purchased by that tweaked out person with their hard earned money. I mean really folks, let’s get real here.

No one asking why these chop shops exist? Maybe we should be asking why these people are turning to illegal activity in the first place, instead of criminalizing their actions that they perform in order to survive. Clearly some needs of theirs are not being met and the easiest way to satisfy those needs is to be a criminal. It is disgusting to see so many people cheer on for a homlessness-to-prison pipeline.

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