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Deputy Joe Bowden is not a biker. He actually laughs at the idea, glancing down at his own belly before chuckling and shaking his head when asked.
“No,” Bowden answered lightly, eyes twinkling at his own sense of humor.
Ask around Houston’s bicycle community, however, and you’ll hear about the man that one cyclist called “The Bike Whisperer.”
So how does a constable’s deputy who doesn’t bike end up a local legend in Houston’s biking community?
The answer is easy. Just solve hundreds of bike theft cases, reuniting cycling enthusiasts with their beloved modes of transportation, while still serving the community as a constable deputy.
Bowden, 51, doesn’t necessarily call bike theft his specialty. It’s just that when he started with the constable’s office, they were flooded with reports about missing bikes.
“When (Precinct 1 Constable) Alan Rosen hired me and put me over here, I think there were about 400 bicycles stolen in a month,” Bowden said. Every case, whatever it was, seemed to have a stolen bicycle attached to it, according to Bowden.
Bowden’s legend has grown since he first joined the constable’s office in 2013. He’s solved countless bike thefts, including discovering more than 60 stolen bikes in Midtown back in 2018. But he didn’t seek out bike theft as his beat.
“They tell me what to do, I do it pretty much,” Bowden said. He gets called in for everything other than homicide, but approaches the work the same no matter what.
“I never really thought about it, I just do my job,” Bowden said. He says that even when he’s working on other cases, he goes through a routine of looking at reports every morning and prowling through social media.
That was likely how he solved Gail Wellenkamp’s case.
Wellenkamp had set out with a couple friends to MKT shopping plaza in Houston Heights on a Wednesday morning, and after eating lunch, the group returned to find her bike was missing. They checked with nearby store owners, and obtained security camera footage that showed the thief using a pair of bolt-cutters to cut the bike lock and riding off.
However, attempts to get the Houston Police Department to take action were fruitless. When the constable’s office called her to set up an interview, she had already considered the bike long gone and was just doing the legwork. The constable that night asked her to send the video and images of the thief to the police, but she couldn’t find a way.
“Everybody I knew thought it was a goner,” Wellenkamp said.
The next morning, Bowden texted Wellenkamp asking for pictures of the thief. Wellenkamp sent them, and Bowden immediately recognized the suspect. He had previously been arrested for bike theft and had just been released.
“So he said, ‘OK, I’m gonna get your bike back,’” Wellenkamp said. “I just didn’t believe it, but you know, I thought OK, we’ll give it a try.”
On Friday, a mere two days later, Wellenkamp was reunited with her bike. Bowden told her that her bike had passed through four different sets of hands before being found in Sugar Land. Bowden hadn’t communicated much with Wellenkamp throughout the process, but the results left her stunned.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said, laughing at the improbability. “I was shocked. I was totally shocked.”
Bowden doesn’t see his work as anything exemplary. He credits the time and leeway he’s granted from his boss. He said a lot of agencies and people don’t get the time to pursue cases the way Bowden does, and the space he gets allows him to produce better results.
“Anyone can do what I’m doing. They really can. But I’m allowed the time to do that. If it wasn’t for [Rosen] allowing me to do that, of course I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Bowden said.
Bowden’s method is tried and true, but he won’t reveal many of his secrets. Bike thieves, he says, are smarter than you think, and he doesn’t want to give them an advantage when he’s doing his work.
But he did say that old fashioned detective work is at the heart of all of his cases, not just the ones with the bikes. That means getting out of the office. Walking around with a picture of the suspect is a time-intensive and laborious process.
“Bicycles can be unique with parts you put on them, so they’re actually easier to look for,” Bowden said. “After a while, it’s kind of turned into what it turned into.”
The major factor in Bowden’s success, at least according to the man himself, is the relationship he’s earned with people. He often spends time at local shops and businesses just killing time and talking to the community.
And that means every part of the community, even the unsavory aspects.
Bowden came from a poor neighborhood and grew up around his share of criminals. He said he was a “knucklehead” in high school, but vividly recalls a police officer who treated him with kindness, even driving him home from school a few times.
He didn’t jump into law enforcement right away, taking a winding path that saw him spend time in Hawaii working for Circuit City. Eventually, he would break into law enforcement at the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office in 2010.
The kindness from his childhood stuck with him, and translated into how he conducted his own police work.
“They’re people, too,” he simply said.
That process leads to results without necessarily jail time, and it allows Bowden to build a rapport with the people he’s helping as well as the suspects he’s putting behind bars. As part of his investigations, he’s regularly in touch with individuals he has previously arrested and even individuals he knows are still criminals.
“You can’t be judgmental. That is not our job,” Bowden said. “I see officers talk down to people, and I’ll be like, ‘Hey man, it’s not your job to judge.’ I mean, do your report. If you need to put them in jail, put them in jail, and let the judges do their job.”
Bowden recalls being called by criminals with warrants out for their arrest, asking him and no one else to take them in.
“I don’t want to do that. But I have to because, you know, there’s a trust issue there,” Bowden said.
That extends back to bike theft, where sometimes he can solve a case without ever really leaving his desk. Sometimes, all it takes is a Facebook message to someone he recognizes on surveillance footage and magically, the bike reappears.
“I don’t specifically look for bikes. That’s not my job, right?” Bowden said. “I just kind of do that as fillers just to help out, because people get attached to their bikes. They love them things like they love their German Shepherds.”
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