They say lightning never strikes the same spot twice, but unfortunately for Denver local Jessica Elliott, the sentiment rings hollow. The Denver citizen has experienced two break-ins at her Sunnyside home in under two years, between 2023 and Thanksgiving of 2024. Both incidents resulted in the theft of bicycles, as well as other miscellaneous items, including power tools.
“It felt kind of violating to know there were people in your space and taking your things,” Elliott said. “It’s weird to say I have an emotional attachment to a bike, but one was a road bike I’d had for like fifteen years, so it was sucky. It didn’t feel great.”
One of Elliott’s bikes was recovered and returned to her, but the other stolen property has yet to be found, and there is little hope that it will be returned to its rightful owner.
“I don’t think I’m gonna get them back at this point,” Elliott said. “At this point, I’m just thankful I got the one back.”
Many stolen bikes, such as Elliott’s, are never recovered by their owners. Police departments, which are often left with recovered bikes, but no owner to link them to, are often forced to figure out what to do with them, leading the people at the Wheat Ridge Police Department to a novel solution: returning the bikes to the community.
“We prefer to donate them to places where we know they will go to a good cause,” said Alex Rose, Public Information Officer for the WRPD. “I think there’s tremendous good we can do with these bikes that pop up.”
Bike thefts like those experienced by Elliott are a pervasive issue across the country. Upwards of 2.4 million bikes are estimated to be stolen nationwide every year, with 59 percent of those thefts occurring in residential areas.
Thefts are on the rise as well, with an estimated 15 percent increase in thefts in 2024, which contributed to an estimated $1.5 billion worth of property loss. As of July 28, there have been a total of 667 bicycle thefts reported throughout Denver during 2025, making for an average of just over three thefts a day. In 2024, the Wheat Ridge area saw 596 reported cases of theft, including many cases of stolen bicycles.
This influx in bike thefts exacerbates a problem that police departments have when recovering stolen bicycles: they often struggle with reuniting these bikes with their owners and, in many cases, are stuck storing them for months on end as evidence or unclaimed property, without any word from the rightful owner or way to identify who they belong to.
“The issue is, sometimes, that property doesn’t get reunited with the owner at the end of a criminal case,” Rose said. “We don’t have infinite storage for all the stuff we collect for these cases, and we end up collecting a lot of bikes.”
The WRPD is required to hold onto any recovered bikes for a minimum of six months and post about them publicly to give the owner a chance to learn where their bike is. However, most of the time, no one comes to claim the bikes or is unable to prove ownership.
“We try to give out just enough information so people can recognize or identify their property,” Rose said. “We’ll give out a loose descriptor, but we’re not going to post a picture of it because then anybody off the street could just say, ‘Hey, that’s mine.’”
Additionally, the WRPD partners with local activists through the Wheat Ridge Active Transportation Advisory Team to donate the bikes, refurbish them and donate them to people in need of transportation in the area.
The Wheat Ridge ATAT is a community group focused on increasing the viability for cycling, walking and public transportation throughout the city. The group hosts regular events to help spread their message and provide resources to help people in the community, including taking donations from both regular citizens and the police department of bikes in need of refurbishment, then fixing them and providing them to people in need in the community.
“We like to partner with them,” Rose said. “They take them to a local bike shop to give them a little TLC, and they’ll put them out at community events, donate them to kids or what have you.”
The WRPD has worked on these donations with community partners for almost a decade, with their most recent event taking place in early July, as volunteers with ATAT loaded 27 bikes onto trucks from the police department to be taken for refurbishing and eventually donated back into the community. WRPD’s policies differ from most others in the broader metro area, including the Denver Police Department, whose policy for unrecovered bikes is to auction them off.
“To be able to take these bikes, give them to community partners, and see them go to, say, kids in the Wheat Ridge community, that’s what our philosophy of community-based policing is all about,” Rose said. “We want to be a force for good in our community, and we try to do that by having great relationships with people, knowing what we can do with the resources we have, and putting those partnerships to good use.”
Even though her bikes weren’t recovered, Elliott has mostly come to terms with what happened and is thankful for the efforts of the police in trying to retrieve her bikes. She’s also pleased to learn that WRPD is returning unclaimed bikes to the community.
“If the alternative is just storing it or destroying it or something, I think that makes sense,” Elliott said of the initiative. “I think if they recover property and can’t trace it back to who owns it, I think that’s a good way to handle it.”
