Are black bikes really stolen more than other colors? Is there any evidence that thieves prefer one color of bike than others? 

I'm not asking for opinion but for a citable reference.
Finding statistics is extremely difficult, but one set of data was located from the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry http://chicago.stolenbike.org

Their statistics page (http://chicago.stolenbike.org/report-statistics) is now dead/404-ed but if you go to the WaybackMachine, you can get archived data from September 2012. 

And tada! 

This one is probably a bit less than scientific, but seemed interesting. 
Also, unlike all of our other stats, it's based on a free-form text entry,
rather than a select-box type field. 
Color   
Black   14.23%
blue    7.60%
Red 5.28%
Silver  5.21%
White   4.87%
Green   2.30%
Grey    1.63%
Yellow  1.26%
Light Blue  1.17%
ORANGE  1.15%
Gray    1.09%
purple  0.91%
Gold    0.83%
Black/Silver    0.80%
Brown   0.74%
dark blue   0.74%


However, to make sense of this data we'd also have to know what proportion of colors are the most popular amongst bike sales because if Black bikes make up 25% of the market but only 14% of thefts, then black bikes would be proportionately less likely to be stolen. So some further research is needed.


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