BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The journalists of the Manchester Evening News have turned up a glum statistic for victims of bike crime: There’s just a one in 368 chance police will track down a stolen bike.
The local paper used police data for the Greater Manchester area and discovered of the 4,044 bikes reported stolen last year, 3,704 were recorded as ‘investigation complete; no suspect identified".
Across the UK the stats are better, but still not great – 75 per cent of bike thieves get away with it.
What we don’t know is whether those bikes were locked up (and if they were, what kind of lock was used?) or whether those bikes were bike marked – a wise measure that helps identify bikes when lost or stolen.
Read the full piece in the MEN here.
UPDATE: James Brown, MD of BikeRegister, the National Cycle Database, gave BikeBiz a comment on the story: "Police have no way of knowing who a bike belongs to unless it is registered. All UK police forces have a login for the BikeRegister database and can check ownership details of any registered cycles they recover on the system.
"More than 476,000 people have already registered their bikes on BikeRegister.com It’s free to do and only takes a couple of minutes. Bike owners can also purchase one of our bike marking kits for added security. Marking reduces the chances of a bike being stolen in the first instance."
