+1

I can take it at face value as the kind of bust that cops in the U.S. pull all the time (the kind that reeks of entrapment) but to throw in the fancy bike just to hike it up to "felony" status is disgraceful. I have seen a couple stings like this on shows like COPS and they never even try to get the bike theives who will break a lock to get your ride- those are the ones I'm worried about.

Real $3900 bicycles are not stolen while they have just been left outside of a Mobile station unlocked, unattended at night in a poor neighborhood. The police are creating a problem so that they can solve it and go back to HQ saying "look what we did boys"

I am of the mindset that if a poor man steals bread to put on his family's table, he is just doing what he has to do. The poster who mentioned that a bike could be a "godsend" for someone in this impoverished neighborhood is absolutely right. Now we can only speculate about the motives of the guy who stole that bike, but in a poor neigborhood where there's next to no upward mobility, no good jobs to be found, there's a good chance he just saw it as an opportunity to get himself a much needed vehicle. How many other people in the same community would have done the exact same thing? I would imagine, a lot of them.

This is how the US wages war on poverty, by finding crooked ways of turning your average poor guy into a class II felon and sending him to prison with a bunch of other poor guys.