A Vancouver-based web series about a band of bicycle vigilantes! The pilot episode of To Catch a Bike Thief follows a group of fed up citizens as they attempt to recover a GPS-tracked “bait bicycle” from the scoundrel who stole it.

Let the trailer explain further:

On Friday, OpenFile spoke to Ingo Lou, the producer and host of the series who said the idea started after his bicycle was stolen outside of his apartment last year.

“It was a very surreal moment when I said to myself, ‘someone at this moment is riding around on my bicycle.’ I imagined what I would say to this person if I ever caught up with them,” Lou explains. “It wasn’t anything particularly nice.”

From there, Lou and co-producer Kirsten Aubrey thought about what it would be like to create that imagined moment for a series.

“And the idea evolved to where we were saying, ‘let’s expand and broaden the mandate of this web series to provide cyclists and communities with the tools to protect themselves against bike theft.” 

And if funding can be secured to produce an entire season, those tools will go beyond GPS-tracked bicycles. The idea, explains Lou, is to get cyclists talking with each other about strategies to keep bikes safe while finding new ways to track down stolen bicycles through online communities.

“Our intent is not to create a law enforcement show,” said Lou. “For the purpose of our web series we just want to talk. We just want to catch up with the bike thieves and say ‘What are you doing?’”

The pilot episode is set to debut in early April. Lou says that’s when a fundraising campaign will begin with more episodes anticipated for future.

Eight more questions about the project with Ingo Lou:

I saw the trailer. I can’t imagine the patience it takes to stakeout a bait bicycle. Can you explain that process?

I liken what we’re doing to a BBC nature documentary that’s trying to follow the mating rituals of a very rare species of bird; camped out in the bushes, waiting for months—if not years—for a very specific event to happen. However, bike theft in Vancouver happens much more frequently than that.

When we were shooting the pilot episode, nothing happened on the first night [about seven hours of waiting, Lou later explained]. It wasn’t until the end of the second night [after another six-hour stakeout], that we were able to capture some footage of the bike being stolen.

As you can imagine, thieves aren’t too keen to talk. Our idea going forward with the series is to talk to what we’ll call “reformed bike thieves,” about the industry and try to understand how the black market of stolen bicycles works.

Planting a bait bicycle and chasing down the person who takes it—aren’t you vigilantes? Is there a concern about the legality of what you guys are doing?

There was a concern and we did end up speaking with the [Vancouver Police Department] about it very early on in the project. At the end of the day, the response we got was: ‘We can’t tell you not to do it, but we certainly prefer that you don’t.’ They certainly don’t want to be promoting vigilantism—and that’s understandable. But our intention is not to inspire that kind of activity. It’s more to explore the issues surrounding bike theft.

And the police actually have their own bait bike program. They were actually asking me for advice on the kind of GPS trackers I use, and what works and what doesn’t work. So at the end of the day, I think the take home message is: they’re not crazy about it, but it’s not illegal.

Have the police seen any of the footage from the pilot episode?

They may or may not have seen what’s available online. It would be interesting to follow up. When we spoke with them about a year ago we hadn’t actually shot anything.

Is the web series going to be based solely in Vancouver?

It is for now. Our intention is to keep it local. But watching the Google analytics of our site, we’ve noticed that views are coming from all over the world. But those involved in the project are all local cyclists. We’re taking this on as a fun project right now, just having some fun and we’ll see where it goes.

How is the series being funded?

We’re going to do a crowd sourcing campaign and the platform we’ll most likely use is kickstarter.com, which is a platform for artists and inventors to showcase their ideas. If people like the idea, they will pledge a certain amount. When the funding target set by the people behind the project is reached, the credit cards of those who donated are charged. But if enough people aren’t interested in the idea, then nobody gets charged.”

What are your funding targets?

With about $20,000 we can pull off a pretty awesome first season. But if we could ever get to $100,000, then we could look at getting a fleet of bait bikes locked up around the city and begin tracking them all simultaneously.

How many bait bikes do you have right now?

We created just the one for the pilot episode.

So it was stolen and you obviously got it back?

We got it back.

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For more on the series and the team behind To Catch a Bike Thief, check out the website here. You can also follow the series on Twitter and Facebook.