FRANKLY, BIKE THIEVES DESERVE THIS. THEY’RE THE INITIAL BROKEN-WINDOWS WINDOW BREAKERS. Visalia Couple Left Bikes in Yard to Lure Thieves, Beat Them With Bats and Post Videos to YouTube: Police.

When I was a kid — like 7-8 — we lived in the married student apartments at Holden Green, right on the Somerville line. Somerville was a pretty tough neighborhood then, and kids would come over and steal our bikes. I organized the neighborhood kids so that whenever one of them showed his face in our area, all the kids would scream “teenagers! teenagers!” (that’s what we called them, though they were probably more like 11 or 12) and throw rocks at them. We weren’t really big enough to hurt them, but we sure were annoying, and made it a lot harder to nonchalantly steal someone’s bike. Bike thefts declined sharply.