[carlospwk]

>This makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about what the police can and would do.

In a lot of places they do absolutely nothing. A lot of bikes show up on sale on places like FB Marketplace shortly after they're stolen, cops could easily go set up meetings with these thieves if they wanted to. You can have god knows how much evidence or pictures or whatever of the thief but they do nothing. If I was selling stolen cars online, they'd be allover me, but bikes don't matter apparently.

>There's not a lot the police can do after a bike is stolen within proportion to the value of the stolen bike and bikes are both easy to steal and easy to scrap for parts (that are practically untraceable in most cases).

Sure, if you look at the value of a single bike this is true. But generally professional bike thieves steal multiple bikes and it ads up. Here in Finland, in 2020 insurance companies paid 11 million euros worth of compensation for stolen bikes. And that's just the ones which were reported & still worth something.