Thanks, that was a good read.
When half of bike owners in an area report having a bicycle stolen, you can safely assume "there's a problem." When people are literally sawing apart bike racks to steal bikes, "there's a problem." I heard that at one company in Seattle, with a locked bike cage in the private parking garage, bikes went missing. Apparently "having a chainlink fence around the cage" wasn't enough - you needed to secure all the links to the concrete at the bottom and top, or thieves would walk into the garage, worm through the top or bottom of the fence, grab a bike, and exit with it (I guess cards weren't required to exit, only enter). It's pretty well absurd. Of course, the police don't care, so why shouldn't you steal someone's bike and trade it for $50 of meth?
Seattle has a lot of problems. But, apparently, not straws now.