You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
It appear that British Transport Police will no longer be investigating the theft of bikes from stations if they've been left for over 2 hours!
Seems madness and theft just seems to be a career choice these days.
Madness.
So at odds with the point of integrated and green transport. Piss poor.
To be fair t can understand the dilemma faced by the BTP. According to the article :
He informed the BTP, which told him officers would not investigate the theft - which happened while he was on shift in London - as he had left the bike at the station for 10 hours.
Getting a copper to review 10 hours of CCTV footage for evidence concerning the theft of one, probably not high value, bicycle, does seem to be an extravagant use of limited resources.
I would have thought that sexual and violent offences are the BTP's greatest concern, railways can very dangerous to persons.
I don't know what the solution is. Maybe have some sort of system whereby the theft victim is able to download the CCTV footage and find the moment of theft themselves? Or could AI one day be used? I suspect that even if the moment of theft is pinpointed it might still not be that useful, eg, a thief with a hood up and folding bolt croppers which literally cut locks in seconds.
It's never the theft of just one bicycle though. Any proper investigation into one theft could lead to the recovery of loads of bikes, and the prosecution of criminals responsible for the loss of hundreds of bikes.
⬆️😂😂
About 6 years ago I had my old Cotic Roadrat nicked from Sowerby Bridge station where apparently there'd been a spate of thefts (a few months previous someone had relieved my bike of the disc brakes that were on it). BTP couldn't have been more unhelpful if they'd tried. They admitted they were aware of the number of thefts from the station but weren't willing/able to do anything at all about it and the security cameras were pointed at the car park, not the bike shed apparently. Seem to remember I called the guy on the phone some choice words as I was so pissed and put the phone down. My one comfort is that I hope the ****s who nicked it found cutting through the Kryptonite lock a lot harder than they did cutting through the bike rack.
It is crap, but considering police resources being cut so far over the last 10-15yrs* I could probably understand it. Also, looking at the Netherlands or Denmark, I could understand it. They understand practical low value bike use and get by pretty well. Personally if I was leaving a bike at a station every day it'd be a ratty looking old road bike. Probably a nice old Italian bike underneath.. looks not giving away anything of the ride quality.
*As so many things, tax the top few % of earners and big business properly and perhaps we'd see some changes. Spending was cut after thew banks were bailed out, so when's the payback? We might get better public transport in general, as well as more policing and reduced pressure on people's £ that results in crime.
It is crap, but considering police resources being cut so far over the last 10-15yrs* I could probably understand it.
As Kelvin says though chances are the person is going to have nicked a whole bunch of bikes. In many cases it will be their "job" along with random other thievery so investigating those cases with cctv could well tick off a bunch of other crimes as well.
The number of hours its been there really is irrelevant unless the tools they are using are really shit in which case it will get in the way of all the other investigations as well.
A missing bike is an easy thing to check for unlike say I was in a station for two hours and someone pickpocketed me at some point. For that someone needs to watch two hours of tape but for a bike its "is it still there?" Start at five hours in. If its still there then jump to 7.5 hours otherwise go to 2.5 hours and so on.
Ahem, for balance... Later in the BBC article it says they take the same approach for cars i.e. 2 hrs no investigaty...
It's never the theft of just one bicycle though. Any proper investigation into one theft could lead to the recovery of loads of bikes, and the prosecution of criminals responsible for the loss of hundreds of bikes.
Does it? My understanding is that stolen bikes are typically disposed of quickly and prior to disposal not kept on premises which could incriminate the thief.
Yes I am sure there are examples of hordes of stolen bikes being discovered but is that very common?
Had a bike stolen from a station in June, and BTP investigated because there was a potential witness who also reported it. It was in a bike shed with BTP run CCTV. If it wasn't for a witness then it would have ended at the report, because of resource to view CCTV and crime type. A helpful PCSO kept in touch with me, but ultimately they couldn't ID the suspect from the footage even though the crime was recorded on CCTV. Case now closed and I got the frame and fork back recently where it had been dumped in wasteland.
Learning for me is that bike theft is decriminalised, CCTV at stations is for other crimes, so is useless as a deterrent in bike sheds. I will now never leave any bike at the station, so will not be travelling there by bike for work ever, which is annoying as the walk takes longer and I enjoyed getting a quick ride in, and getting home quickly at the end of the day.
Ahem, for balance... Later in the BBC article it says they take the same approach for cars i.e. 2 hrs no investigaty...
Thats not exactly balance but just extending their laziness. As above I would also suggest that bikes theft is generally easier to spot as well.
They are basically saying they arent going to investigate anything since who goes to a train station for a max of two hours? I reckon I have done it once or twice when picking up tickets in advance.
A helpful PCSO kept in touch with me, but ultimately they couldn't ID the suspect from the footage even though the crime was recorded on CCTV.
I would imagine that is a very major issue. A prolific bike thief who is obviously fully aware of the presence of CCTV cameras isn't going to allow themselves to be easily identified.
Staking out the bike racks sounds like the only really effective measure, which is something that I believe occasionally occurs.
"
Getting a copper to review 10 hours of CCTV footage for evidence concerning the theft of one, probably not high value, bicycle, does seem to be an extravagant use of limited resources.
I would have thought that sexual and violent offences are the BTP's greatest concern, railways can very dangerous to persons.
I'd agree with that & a BTP quote from the article pretty much says it:-
The BTP said: "The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV... the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm.
However, surely it doesn't need a officer to review the footage, don't forces have civilian roles (like admin. & stuff). I wouldn't have thought that spotting someone grinding through bicycle lock requires a highly trained specialist surveillance officer (especially when you know which bike was nicked & where to look).
Couldn't someone else review the footage and extract the relevant few minutes to pass on to an officer for action?
As Kelvin says though chances are the person is going to have nicked a whole bunch of bikes. In many cases it will be their "job" along with random other thievery so investigating those cases with cctv could well tick off a bunch of other crimes as well.
It's true, was the case with a bike I had stolen a while back - they suspected it was part of goings-on with other illegal things and were keen on info that could help pin something on one of them. But that was local policing 20 years ago.
CCTV on a bike shed won't catch anyone. Not unless you have facial recognition of the actual act and trace them back to a location. There's kid's angle-grinding locks in broad daylight in london, being filmed by passers by, they don't care because there isn't the resources to go after them. It's like having doorbell cam footage of a masked thief, what does that tell you unless someone is combing through for details to x-ref to other footage? Has to be a pretty major incident to justify that, unf.
I will now never leave any bike at the station, so will not be travelling there by bike for work ever,
That's a shame - all you need is a bike that's enjoyable to ride but worthless to a thief. iirc your stolen bike was something really nice. There's loads of choice in basic train station bikes? Or a Brompton, take it on the train with you?
Getting a copper to review 10 hours of CCTV footage for evidence concerning the theft of one, probably not high value, bicycle, does seem to be an extravagant use of limited resources.
Surely it would only take 5 minutes max to work out when the bike was stolen, flicking through the video to see if the bike is there / not there and working from there.
That's a shame - all you need is a bike that's enjoyable to ride but worthless to a thief. iirc your stolen bike was something really nice. There's loads of choice in basic train station bikes? Or a Brompton, take it on the train with you?
Very true, it was too nice and I'd talked myself into a false sense of security over the years leaving bikes without incident. I have thought about a ratty bike or Brompton, but I don't really have space for one just to leave at the station, and Bromptons are still pretty expensive for the limited use i'd get from it. I have a utility bike for all other duties like shopping and school drop off, it's just still a bit too good for the station. Might change my mind some point, the theft is still a bit raw in my mind.
My experience of CCTV in cases like this is that it is mostly useless. It gives, at best, a general view which may or may not catch the crime being committed. There is never footage close enough up to identify the thief.
Town centre CCTV which is being monitored by an operator is different. If an incident is observed then the operator zooms in and does his best to get a close facial shot.
Actually the last incident I recall dealing with which was "solved" by CCTC resulted in me pointing out to the person who had reported an assault that it was the opposite way round. The CCTV captured an argument between the drunk complainer and another male. After a few verbal exchanges the complainer headbutted he other male. He subsequently came off worse as the other male defended himself.
And, as above, the other male could not be identified in the footage. We found the incident on the system because the complainer gave us a rough time and place and he, the complainer, was identified by clothing and the fact he was fat and bald.
On bike thefts. It was rare than anyone reporting a stolen bike had a record of the frame number. We frequently recovered suspect stolen bikes where we couldn't trace the owner. If I was parking at a station for 10 hours it would be a £100 scrapper with a new drivetrain fitted so it worked OK but looked like a pile of crap.
Meh, the headline is a little Click-baity isn't it...
We get the public services we pay for, as a nation we are coming up on two decades or so of the "Austerity experiment" and it shows not signs of being cancelled that I can see. The constant Narrative of national belt tightening is the core problem, not necessarily intransegent police.
The Practical question for most people who use bicycles as transport is do you go campaigning for the police to priorotise bicycle thefts, and if so what other types of Crime have to slide down the prioty list to achieve that in the short-term? Or do you just go and buy an undesireable old Nag of a bike to leave at the train station rather than buy another posh Ti Dandyhorse on C2W?
Longer-term if it worries you that the police are increasingly underfunded to perform some of their core functions, push/vote for better funding of services like, so that we don't have to decide which Crimes are investigated and which are ignored.
Getting a copper to review 10 hours of CCTV footage for evidence concerning the theft of one, probably not high value, bicycle, does seem to be an extravagant use of limited resources
You don't review 10hrs though.
You know the bike was parked at (eg) 8am and gone by 6pm, 10hrs.
Skip to 5hrs in. Is the bike there? If yes, it was nicked between 1pm and 6pm. If no, it was 8am - 1pm.
Repeat the pattern and you very quickly narrow down the window of when it actually happened. It's a 10 minute job, not watching the whole thing.
You don't review 10hrs though.
You don't need to 'watch' 10 hours of footage which is why I specifically used the term 'review'. But I still got pulled up about it! 🤣
Reviewing 10 hours of CCTV footage is likely to be time-consuming whether you watch all of it or not, I would have thought.
Which is presumably why the BTP have put a 2 hour limit. Unless anyone can suggest another reason?
In reality they re just confirming what has been actually not been investigated for years
What will they actually find if they investigate? Someone in a hoody with their face obscured cut the lock and ran off with your bike. They won’t be able to identify the criminal because he was wearing a hood. Best case scenario is they took an officer off of patrol and you now know what time your bike was stolen. If you’re really, really, really, really lucky they’ll go
“That’s Kevin, he’s a homeless junkie, your bike is now in a crackhouse or a ditch, we’ll pick him up tomorrow morning when he wakes up, but your bike won’t be there”.
It sucks, but with limited budget and resources the police have to prioritise where they use their resources. Just have a really cheap and shitty bike you bought for £25 (or found in a skip) to ride to the station or get a Brompton and take it with you.
Reviewing 10 hours of CCTV footage is likely to be time-consuming whether you watch all of it or not, I would have thought.
Your use of "review" vs "watch" seems a unique one to you.
If its saved to disk and a semi decent UI then it really wouldnt add much compared to 2 hours. Assuming the bike is reasonably visible on the screen since if not then the 2 hours cut off is irrelevant and might as well just say nope to everything.
The bike is either there or its not so its a simple binary search.
You start at 5 hours. If its not there you go to two and a half and if it is you go to seven and a half.
Remember when the first proposals for CCTV everywhere came out? Remember how it was going to cut all crime?
Every time the government demands new surveillance powers they claim it will cut crime: CCTV, 'back door' to encryption, digital identity cards, banning VPNs - it's never about the crimes that affect us, it's because they are paranoid, nosey gits.
Lots of folk won't like it, but there's a great case for the use of AI in reviewing video footage in these cases...
Remember how it was going to cut all crime?
Well, “in person” crime has been cut. The areas where crime is increasing are all in the digital realm, hence that’s where new tools are being sought.
Definitely think reviewing CCTV footage is the type of job suited to AI. See what AI is generating (there's a current thread on here). If it can generate that, I imagine it could identify the presence and absence of a bicycle.
Thanks kelvin, that’s interesting, I’ll take a look
I just ran the article it past Grok, which said:
I would be curious about the vehicle crime post 2023 as the automobile industry have been busy replaying all the IT security mistakes of the past couple of decades I think it has started to go back up again.
Your use of "review" vs "watch" seems a unique one to you.
Why do you think that reviewing CCTV footage involves watching it in its entirety and at normal speed?
Although I am more interested in why you think the BTP have said that they are willing to investigate cases in which bikes have been left for less than 2 hours but not beyond that.
Surely there must be a reason for that? For me the obvious explanation is that reviewing 2 hours of CCTV footage is significantly less time-consuming than reviewing 10 hours, but I am interested in hearing other possible explanations.
That's impressive, especially the drop in violet crime. Thanks for that 👍
Edit : And to think that one of the many Thatcher myths is that she was tough on crime and red-hot on law and order!
What i expect the real reason for the 2 hour rule, is that virtually no bikes will be ever left for less than 2 hours, therefore it practically eliminates their need to bother policing any bike theft.
I've done similar recently to see who stole a motorcycle out of our company car park.
What you do is binary search. So jump to the middle, bike still there? yes? go to half way between current position and the end. Bikes still there? yes? go to half way ... repeat. No? Okay go back a bit, still there? etc It's the work of probably 5 minutes to get to the right bit even in 8+ hours of footage.
In fact it took a lot longer to download the footage than to review it.
Surely there must be a reason for that? For me the obvious explanation is that reviewing 2 hours of CCTV footage is significantly less time-consuming than reviewing 10 hours, but I am interested in hearing other possible explanations.
Its certainly an explanation, although as others says if the bike is sitting directly under a camera you can be much quicker at screening every frame. If however you can't distinguish that bike on the camera you are looking at watching video in the hope of seeing someone moving the bike away from the area, a much more laborious task (although still not 1:1). If you find the bike getting nicked but can't see the person then you need to look at other camera's before and after.
I can see two other reasons why you might make a time limit (other than just to cut the workload to near zero). First if the bike was nicked just after it was left, you were probably watched leaving it and so there's potentially some higher risk crimes (or at least crimes that courts might perceive merit higher sentences that "it was just opportunist, your honour". Second the chance of finding the bike in the hands of the thief are much higher if the theft was recent. ("Your honour, I just noticed the bike abandonned in the park and it looked like a good one so I thought it best to take to a police station, I was riding it round town trying to find one that was actually manned")
The question is of course one of resources. Which reduces bike theft more? Spending more time investigating and occassionally getting lucky, or having the same number of man hours spent on high visibility patrols?
The BBC quote which makes it to the headlines is nonsense. They aren't decriminalising it - if they catch someone in the act they don't turn round and say "oh that bike's been there 4 hours crack on", I suspect if you call them and say your air tag is moving right now and they have resources nearby, they probably don't ask how long its been stationary for. In fact I suspect if you have tracking info or something else to go on they might be much more interested even if its outside the scope of their guidelines - these are reasons for a cop who believes it will be pointless to use their discretion not absolute commandments not to do any policing. Its irritating if you are a cyclist and they say they won't review the CCTV but be realistic even if they did the chances of IDing the suspect are low (serial thieves are stupid but not that stupid!), the chances of recovering your bike intact are even lower. The cost of securing a conviction is almost certainly more than any bike we would leave in the station, and the sentence probably not to your satisfaction anyway.
BTP is funded mostly by train operators. That means if you want more BTP people looking at bike thefts, you need to be prepared to pay more for your train tickets.
More resources always changes the difficult decisions that the police have to make about how to use those resources. But as someone who has apprehended a bike thief in the act, with multiple independent witnesses, and handed them to the Police... only for there to be no charge or proper investigation... my suspicion is that bike theft is often not treated as theft for reasons other than resources or ease of evidence gathering or the chances of finding the perpetrators.
The cost of securing a conviction is almost certainly more than any bike we would leave in the station
There is nothing unique about bike theft there.
Correct - but if you look in the article - there's nothing unique about bike theft crossing the "too much effort" threshold either. Every society needs to decide which crimes its going to invest in pursuing and which are not economical (or more economical to invest a fraction of the prosecution cost in prevention/diversion/welfare to avoid). Everything is far too silo'd in budgets - if there was a holistic approach it would be obvious that every £ spent on mental health, social work, housing or education to make (minor) crime less likely would be ££ you save the justice system.The cost of securing a conviction is almost certainly more than any bike we would leave in the station
There is nothing unique about bike theft there.
My son's bike was stolen from his school (when he was still at school, years ago). The school gave him access to the video.
We found it had been taken by some bloke in a balaclava. Unsurprisingly the police did not take it any further.
Meanwhile, when I was on holiday in the Netherlands this year I encountered more police officers patrolling the cycle paths in a week than I've seen in what feels like my entire life. I think we just don't prioritise policing in this country for whatever reason.
Bikes, cars… I bet they haven’t even investigated the theft of a train for years.
Sorry
I saw a news article about this and they said the police wouldn't look into thefts from a train, if the person reporting didn't state what carriage they were in!
So if you have a bike nicked from a train station, is it literally a case of doing an online police report for a job number, and then submitting that to your insurer?