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 reported that in 2022/23 an eye-watering 77,313 cycles were reported stolen in the UK – which is one every seven minutes. Furthermore, stolen-bikes.co.uk estimates 71 per cent of victims don’t report the theft.
A little more than three-quarters of us believe the police are ineffective at catching thieves and returning bikes to owners – and we’re right.
A whopping 90 per cent of bike thefts reported to police are closed without a suspect being identified – and only 1.7 per cent result in someone being charged.
At the start of the year, I became one of those statistics when my one-year-old hybrid was stolen from a pedestrianised area in central London.
In plain sight
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 only two minutes to arrive with the angle grinder, cut through the lock and leave with my bike.
Even after reporting the theft, with my 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 my bike 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, in a sense, they 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 London, 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 focuses on enforcement, education, engineering and engagement, so as well as catching thieves, they encourage the public to security mark their bikes, register their frame numberss and buy a decent bike 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 one million bikes are sold in the UK. However, there are only 1.2m bikes 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.
Hope is important
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 (although Halliwell 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 Crime Survey for England and Wales in January 2024, cycle theft reporting is down 54 per cent 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 per cent of French bikes are registered. Elsewhere, 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 Halliwell insists it's part of policing by consent. Cycle theft dropped by 60 per cent in Cambridge following the initiative.
Meanwhile, police are trying to tackle marketplaces for stolen bikes.
Too good to be true?
This includes persuading online platforms, such as Gumtree and eBay, to require sellers to upload bicycle frame numbers, in the same way as 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, Halliwell’s advice is to take every precaution possible with your bike and be mindful where and from who you buy second-hand bikes: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
