Originally Posted by Andy_K

You left out the part where they taze you for no apparent reason.

Seriously, I'll admit that this is a plausible scenario. For a white male with a stable employment history, this story might even be enough to avoid conviction. Pessimistically, I would expect that stories like will be used in defenses soon and that quick hand-offs will become a common part of the bike thieves repertoire in the near future. I actually had thought about it, and I came up with an Assassin's Creed-type scenario where the thief takes the bike and immediately rides to a park bench and sits next to the bike for a while, then if questioned claims that somebody else left the bike there. I can easily see that evolving into the thief leaving the bike next to a stranger sitting on a bench for some period of time. Video of the actual theft would be key to prosecution.

In any event, it's already common practice for newspapers and television news to publish photos of people who have been arrested but not convicted of various crimes. There's really nothing new here in that regard. The reason not to wait for conviction is that a program like this isn't really about getting convictions. SFPD doesn't want people in jail for bike theft. More likely this is a program to trigger probation violation for people they want in jail for other reasons. Secondarily, it works as a deterrent to theft, and that's what the published photo part of the program seems to be about.