If you’re looking for handouts from the city’s stash of confiscated and abandoned loot, chances are the D.C. police will hook you up—as long as you’re willing to take bicycles. That’s what happened when Petworth resident Jack Jackson turned to the police for a donation to his fledgling music school. Though he hoped for brass and percussion instruments, he had to settle for 60 busted-up bicycles, which he retrieved from a police warehouse in Anacostia last fall. “We normally don’t get instruments,” says Lt. Derek Gray of the evidence control branch. “Definitely less [instruments] than bikes. A lot less.” Currently, Gray says, the warehouse has about 800 bikes—up from last year—and that number typically swells to about 1,800 during the summer months. Jackson is still hoping the cops will come through with some instruments but says he appreciates the bikes all the same; he plans to fix them up and give them to his students. “It’s a part of the chemistry-building,” he says. “So in a sense…they will be used as instruments for the band.”—Rachel Beckman