Todd Spitzer has spent his career as Orange County’s top prosecutor locking people up, not running consumer trade-in events. But on September 13, his office is setting up at Angel Stadium to pay out as much as $1,000 in gift cards for e-bikes, e-motorcycles, pocket bikes, and e-scooters. No questions asked. Working or not. Names entirely optional. It’s called BUY BACK SAFETY, and it’s the most aggressive response yet to a problem that has quietly been overwhelming Southern California emergency rooms.
The format is borrowed from a familiar law enforcement playbook. Police departments have run gun buyback programs for decades, trading gift cards for firearms nobody wants sitting in a closet. Orange County just swapped the pistols for two-wheelers, and it’s paying for the whole thing with asset forfeiture funds seized from criminal enterprises rather than tax dollars. That funding detail says something: the DA’s office is treating illegal e-motos as a public safety problem serious enough to justify the same financial tool used to dismantle drug and gang operations.
The payout scale doubles as a crash course in a classification system most owners never bother to learn. Pocket bikes and homemade mini-bikes bring $200 in gift cards from Target, Walmart, or Dick’s Sporting Goods. Class 1 e-bikes are worth $300, Class 2 e-bikes $400, and Class 3 e-bikes $600. Anything that gets classified as an e-motorcycle tops the list at $1,000, with law enforcement on site making that call. The spread isn’t random, it roughly tracks how much legal exposure each category actually carries…