FIGHTING BACK
don’t prevent theft – indeed, they actually work best when the thieves don’t know they’re there (so they won’t try to find and disable them). What they do give is a route to recover the bike once stolen, which is a unique feature. Using mobile phone and radio frequency technology, they send out their location to a central control hub, which can direct the cops to find your bike, and hopefully arrest the scumbags. What often happens though, is that the thief has left your bike parked up under a cover somewhere nearby, and waits to see if it’s recovered via a tracker. That fact aside, at least it gives you a chance of getting your bike back.
Like many of the bits we’ve covered in this piece, there’s no fool-proof, or should that be thief-proof, way of guaranteeing your bike remains safely in your possession, but through applying these tactics you stand a far greater chance of keeping it out of those scabby scroats’ hands. What’s really important is that you recognise the best person to improve your bike security is you. So get planning, identify the chinks in your bike security armour, and develop defences to fill them… One worrying trend is gangs of thieves actually attacking you when you're on your bike, and stealing it off you. It makes sense actually – no locks, the key’s in the ignition, and it’s already started. All they need to do is get rid of you…
This is super-rare luckily, even in London. But it’s worth considering what you’d do. We spoke to the
Fast Bikes legal eagle, Andrew Dalton, and asked him about how the law would view some, er, ‘precautions’. What about, say, carrying a claw hammer or a hatchet in your tank bag? That could get you into bother he reckons.
“A claw hammer isn’t brilliant as it shows planning. But a helmet head butt is a natural reaction. I come from a boxing background and if someone tried to nick my bike, wearing a crash helmet my drill would be to open the chin with open handed jabs to the top of the helmet. That lifts the head, exposing the throat for a hard jab with a closed fist to the windpipe…”
And Andrew has some other sound advice too. “Fit a lanyard ignition killswitch, so if the bike gets taken away from you, the engine will die, so they can’t just ride it away without you.”
Whether it’s a bike-jacking, or coming across someone in your garage, it’s tempting to go all Charles Bronson on the perps. But remember your limitations: you might have been handy in your youth, but if you now spend your days driving a desk in the sales department, you might come off second-best to a couple of street kids.
Weapons seem like an easy answer, but again, when did you last get involved in a melée fight with a baseball bat or other weapon? And the pitfalls are obvious even if you do come off best in a scrap. The test for any action to defend your property is ‘was it reasonable and proportionate?’ So the cops probably won’t mind if you knock a couple of teeth out of a bike thief’s mouth when you find him in your garage at 2am. But if you kill an unarmed 17-year-old kid with a bread knife because he tried to steal your Panigale then, no matter how much you liked that Ducati, you’re very probably going to jail for murder.