To catch a thief
Laura becomes a statistic in the epidemic of stolen bikes
Do you ever get that sinking feeling when you return to your bike, momentarily believing it gone, only to realise, thank goodness, it’s still there?
No-one could blame you for fearing the worst: thebestbikelock.com notes in 2022/23 an eye-watering 77,313 cycles were reported stolen in the UK – which is one every seven minutes. Stolen-bikes.co.uk estimates 71% of victims didn’t report the theft. A little more than three quarters of us believe police are ineffective at catching thieves and returning bikes to owners; and we’d be right. 90% of police cases are closed without a suspect being identified, and just 1.7% result in someone being charged.
At the start of the year I became one of those statistics when my year-old hybrid was stolen from a pedestrianised area in central London. It was broad daylight, so seeing my lock cut open on the ground next to the bike rack puzzled me for a moment. CCTV, retrieved later from a nearby office building, revealed three men took just two minutes to arrive with the angle grinder, cut through the lock, and leave with my bike. Even reporting the theft, with frame number, to the Met Police, BikeRegister, the website Stolen Ride and anywhere else I could think of, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll get it back. The thieves will have sold the bike within hours, to an unsuspecting member of the public who believes they’ve bought a like-new shiny magenta Trek hybrid for a steal – which they in fact have.
I contacted Titus Halliwell, the national police lead for cycle crime, to talk through what’s happening to stop the scourge of cycle theft. He explains two key barriers to getting more people cycling are road safety fears and fear of theft. That’s why, as part of plans to grow cycling in the capital, two police divisions were set up to tackle those fears. And because it’s so hard to catch cycle thieves once a bike is stolen, they want to stop it happening in the first place. The Met Police’s Cycle Taskforce focused on four e’s: enforcement, education, engineering and engagement, so as well as catching thieves, they encourage the public to security mark their bikes, register frame numbers and buy a decent lock. Then it’s about things such as ensuring there’s secure cycle parking available where it’s needed.
It’s not an easy crime to tackle: every year an estimated million bikes are sold in the UK and yet just 1.2m machines are registered on the database BikeRegister – the one police look at when trying to identify stolen machines – so even when bikes are recovered, it’s hard to find the legal owner. Ultimately, if thieves want your bike, they will take it. Angle grinders, of the type used on my lock, are cheap to buy, and cut through most locks like butter (though Titus says Litelok’s X1 D-lock is an exception). The police in my case did their best, retrieving the CCTV, hoping to at least identify the culprits, but the men were too far away from the cameras. In 17 years in London, this was the sixth bike I’d lost and I’ll likely see none of them again.
There is reason for hope, though. According to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales, cycle theft reporting is down 54% compared with the year to March 2010 – in part because of police efforts to tackle the issue. In 2021 France introduced mandatory registration of bike frame numbers to new owners at the point of sale, and three years on, 35% of French bikes are registered. Cambridge police ran an initiative stopping suspect-looking cyclists and quizzing them about their bikes. The potential echoes of stop and search, which is disproportionately targeted at Black people, gave me pause, but Titus insists it is part of policing by consent. Cycle theft dropped by 60% in Cambridge following the initiative.
Meanwhile police are trying to tackle marketplaces for stolen bikes. This includes persuading online sellers such as Gumtree and Ebay to require sellers to upload bicycle frame numbers, in the same way as car registration plates must be displayed on second-hand car ads. This would mean bikes can be checked against the stolen bike register. In my decade or more of writing about the topic, police and the likes of BikeRegister have been in talks with these online platforms to achieve this. It shouldn’t be that hard. In the meantime, Titus’s advice is to take every precaution possible with your bike and be mindful where and who you buy secondhand bikes from: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.