If you saw someone trying to steal a bike what would you do? Call the police? Intervene? Or do nothing? With bike theft such a big problem, we would hope that passers-by would call the police to report a crime in progress, however a study carried out by the Cambridgeshire police has shown otherwise.
In Cambridge four bikes were stolen in broad daylight, without one person calling the police to report the crimes. Luckily, this time the offenders were plain clothed police stealing their own bikes. These thefts were set up as part of the City’s Operation Huntsman, which is using crime prevention advice alongside patrols to crackdown on robbery, burglary and theft.
Over the period of a few hours, the plain clothed police could be seen using bolt cutters to cut through locks. However despite being in full view of many witnesses, no-one reported the crimes.
Video footage of these crimes, have now been put up on theforces YouTube site in order to encourage people to report crimes when they see them.
This staged theft shows that you can never be too careful when it comes to securing your bike and even if you have your bike stored in a relatively busy area, that doesn’t mean anyone will stop a thief seen attempting to take your bike.
Sergeant Andrea Gilbert said: “The CCTV is shocking because the thefts are blatant yet, despite a large number of people witnessing the crime, we didn’t receive a single call."
Here at Asgard, we are always reporting bike theft statistics, tips and advice but the one thing we all need to do to combat this problem is report it when we see it. It’s an easy and effective thing that we can all do and we shouldn’t assume that someone else will do it for us. If you’re a cyclist you may be more likely to report a bike theft, than a non-cyclist, but when it comes to theft in general we all need to stick together!
If you are a regular cyclist make sure your use 2 different types of bike lock, park in a busy area and possibly near somewhere that has some CCTV to cover all bases.
