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Bike thievery. It's a national epidemic. But San Francisco is, as we all know, one place where it's happening with great frequency. It's the setting for a new Today show report in which they basically entrap a couple of thieves by leaving an expensive bike barely locked up on Mission Street, and wait with cameras for someone to steal it. They also rigged the bike with a GPS locator and followed the thief to a home in the Bayview where the bike had already been disassembled and hidden in a shed out back.

Remarkably, the people allow the NBC crew into the house, and they use their tracker to find the $1500 mountain bike, and meanwhile everyone denies stealing it or knowing anything about it. It's kind of hilarious.

It should be noted that the NBC crew should have been a little more cautious carrying around all that pricey camera equipment ... local news crews have been mugged or robbed often enough, and just this week a KRON reporter was robbed at gunpoint over in Potrero Hill.

[Today]