Is Somebody Stealing Bikes on The Seacoast?

Editor's note: This article was written by a Townsquare Media Northern New England radio personality and may contain the individual's views, opinions or personal experiences.

I've been seeing a lot of posts from The (un)Official City of Dover, NH Facebook page on my feed. And do you know what I've seen a lot of within the last month?

Posts about bike thefts. More specifically kids' bike thefts.

This actually seems like it started maybe six weeks ago in mid-October, when the Portsmouth community rallied around a veteran who said his bike was stolen from his mother's home in the Gosling Meadows neighborhood.

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Fast forward a couple of weeks, and this post popped up about a red Schwinn bike being taken from East Concord Street in Dover. No real update about it was given, just that it was stolen. It seemed to be just a one-off thing until more posts began to roll in.

During temperate weather on November 25, this post surfaced talking about a 10-year-old boy's silver Diamondback bike being swiped. The bike was never found, but thankfully a friend of the boy's mother decided to buy the boy a bike to replace the stolen one.

Finally, on Wednesday, I got another notification while scrolling through my Facebook feed about this post detailing a young girl's powder blue Nel Lusso bike being taken from Hampshire Street

So, listen. The year 2020 has been tough enough for most people. It's tough enough for kids that can't get a typical education because it's half in school and half at home (and some are still fully remote). They can't interact with their peers like in a normal educational setting. For some, perhaps, their only genuine interactions may be riding their bikes around town with friends.

Like Kevin McAllister said in Home Alone 2: "You can mess with a lot of things, but you can't mess with kids on Christmas."