tiktok.com/@onlyonexbox

Another woman walking two dogs nearby doesn't help. A TikTok user named Onlyonexbox, holding the phone with the camera activated, doesn't help either.

Earlier in the month, two videos filmed in San Diego surfaced of a man taking a bicycle from a screaming woman and a man punching someone's face trying to steal a bike. Many online say it's the same perp.

Since the pandemic, bicycle theft numbers have surged, especially in San Diego County. Also rising is the brazenness of bike theft — the two incidents mentioned above were in broad daylight.

As of August 27, so far this year in San Diego, 231 bikes were reported stolen, according to Bike index, the world's largest non-profit bicycle registration service. The reported theft number reflects an estimated 30-mile radius around downtown San Diego. The 231 theft reports on the site are a much lower figure than the actual bike theft numbers, as not all victims make reports of their stolen bikes or the victims' inability to connect with the San Diego Police Department to file a crime report. Also, not all bikes and thefts in San Diego are registered within Bike Index's database, where many legit bike owners upload their bikes' photos and accompanying serial numbers.

Bryan Hance, the co-founder of Bike Index, watched the viral TikTok video clip of the screaming bike rider mentioned above. When asked if it's a rare occurrence when someone takes a bike against someone else's will, also known as bike jacking — he responded, "I can think of maybe half a dozen of these kinds of incidents off the top of my head." That's a small number compared to the 131,234 reported "regular thefts" on Hance's database, which they launched in 2014.

The disturbing Tik Tok Video, filmed on August 5, starts with a woman wearing black-colored shorts and a striped top, who is depicted yelling, "Helllllllllp, help me," as she's lying on an East Village street. A man wearing an orange shirt, black pants, and a backpack pulls a pink-colored bike away from her and walks away with the bike in hand. "Somebody help me," the woman continues. 

Another woman walking two dogs nearby doesn't help. A TikTok user named Onlyonexbox, holding the phone with the camera activated, doesn't help either. But he continues filming from across the street. He'd later say he called the cops. "He fu--ing kicked me then pushed me into the car," the woman continues screaming. The man who took the bike bends over, picks up a bicycle helmet on the sidewalk, and then treks nonchalantly towards the Park Boulevard trolley stop. The woman yells, "Tie my shoe!" Then, with one shoe on and one off, she briskly hobbled toward the man in question, and the video stopped. On TikTok, the 23-second clip garnered 12,000 likes and over 6,000 comments. It pulled 850,000-plus plays in less than a month because this type of bike jacking is rarely caught on video and, more so, never uploaded. "They aren't as common as regular thefts, but they happen," Hance continued. "We've had a couple up here in Portland, and I know Oakland had a recent rash, too, with gunpoint robberies involved."

"I was still holding the bike and saw the fist heading toward my face."

Then, on August 9, a man attacked another man trying to steal an e-bike by Big Kitchen Café on 30th and Grape Street in South Park. The incriminating video captured by a nearby surveillance camera aired on CBS 8 News shows the perp, a man dressed in white colored pants and a white tee. The perp walks up to a group of people and attempts to steal the e-bike. Clifford Nies, a buddy of the e-bike owner, grabs the back tire, preventing the perp from taking off. The perp then punches Nies in the face. "I was still holding the bike and saw the fist heading toward my face, and I knew that's not where you wanna be," Nies explained on the televised newscast. "Thankfully, I was able to move in time because he hit my head but didn't completely connect. I would have been knocked out on the pavement. It was pretty shocking because it was in broad daylight in front of a lot of young children."

Nies thinks the man who socked him is responsible for the previous East Village alleged bike theft mentioned earlier in the article., "I found a very similar clip of this person. I don't want this person to attack someone more vulnerable than me."

On Saturday, I interviewed Ray (who requested I only use his first name in the article) as he rode with "200 or so" cyclists in Chula Vista en route towards Tijuana. The trek began in Logan Heights and is an annual trans-border bike ride called Los Cruzadores. "That type of bike jacking would never happen with us around," Ray laughed. "And honestly, I've never heard of people jacking someone's bike while still sitting on it or even holding it — shit's crazy. Even in Tijuana, that never happened .... Plus, that was in the daytime — un-freakin'-believable!"

And where do many of these bikes end up after being stolen in San Diego County? Hance replied, "We continue to find and recover most stolen bikes from online marketplaces like OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace — but mostly OfferUp. So we continue to route all victims to those sites to find their stolen bikes, and we sure wish the various state Attorneys General would do something about the rampant black market fencing taking place on those platforms."

Hance concluded that San Diego bike theft reports on Bike Index increased from 464 reported thefts in 2021 to 469 in 2022; theft recoveries in those years also increased from 17 to 19.