BTP says they won't investigate bike thefts at stations if it has been locked for more than 2 hours. So if you're commuting to work you're out of luck and deserve to have your bike stolen I guess.
This basically tells all criminals if they see a bike locked up for any bit of time they can pinch it with zero repercussions.
by nifty_st
32 comments
Oooh, exciting! So there’s a whole bunch of crimes I can just get away with then?
What about burglary? Okay to nick someone’s stuff if they’ve been out of the house for two hours?
Financial crime? Okay to drain someone’s bank account if they haven’t checked their balance for two hours?
Adverse possession? Used to be 12 years but I guess now it is *two hours*.
Absolute lunacy.
The justification from the police implies that they believe that reviewing 10 hours of security footage for a crime will take an officer 10 hours.
I can absolutely believe that they are stupid enough to think this.
Don’t lock your bike at the one place it should be really safe.
How are we so bad at this? Look at other countries like Belgium and the Netherlands where the bike storage is safe and very usable.
First the bombshell panorama investigation into how institutionally racist and sexist the police are, and now this which doubles down on how fucking useless these pigs are
Police keep taking your L’s, ACAB!
This is simply an admission that they don’t investigate bike theft. Maybe cyclists should club together and employ a security guard to look after their property if the police won’t?
Seems like a fantastic use case for AI to review video footage, or even better, alert the police in real time when there is a theft in progress.
I’m sure there is a British start-up that would happily build the technology at a reasonable price as they would benefit from the publicity.
Jokers
BTP save a lot more money from rolling this out to other crimes reducing initiatives:
* No responding to crime outside of Zone 3
* People over 50 should be able to handle themselves, so no responding to their issues
* Anyone under 5 doesn’t matter either
* No responding to reported crime after 3pm on a Sunday as nothing happens then anyway.
Will they still at the very least give a crime reference number so that you can submit a claim if your bike is insured?
“maybe it’s time British Transport Police said ‘we can’t do these any more’ and hand it over to the local police.”
So they can do the exact same thing, plus the extra expense of processing the paperwork from it being handed over. Superb idea.
>while any bikes stolen worth less than £200 will also not be investigated.
is that at the replacement cost it’s insured for today? or the actual value of the bike.
asking cos mine was only 200+ change new & has 10 years of depreciation.
All caused by wealth inequality:
1. More people pushed into poverty == thefts on the rise.
2. Underfunded government == no resources to investigate
Yay
lets not pretend they will investigate if stolen under 2 hours anyway
Won’t this make bike insurance void in most cases?
No surprise then that the likes of Lime and Forest are so popular.
Lack of policing will lead to the rise of vigilantes. People are starting to get pissed off. A quick Google search shows me so many people that are willing to assist recovering stolen bikes without the police. It’s only a matter of time before things get ugly.
They weren’t going to investigate anyway. Now you at least know not to waste your time.
I’m not surprised, I had an Amazon van make a train stop at a controlled crossing and then hit me from behind. BTP and NYP just said sorry, even with photos and the ability to contact the train driver. Don’t bother with the police, seek your own justice.
Best to up your bicycle security then.
Angle grinder resistant u-locks, additional locks, an alarm and trackers will give you more chances off your bicycle staying secure. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
A manual binary search would take minutes to find this. You could narrow down to a minute by scrubbing through the video 9 times. For a digital video file this would take maybe 5? minutes?
“Any offence which is not investigated will still provide us with valuable intelligence, used to direct our patrols and operations.”
Victim of bike theft: my bike is stolen.
BTP: we can’t investigate but thank you for letting us know as it’s valuable intelligence to us.
Mine was stolen from outside Fulham Broadway on Tuesday, between 10am and 1pm with cameras everywhere. I filed a report and they closed it off within 2 hours due to ‘lack of evidence’. Doubt they even read 50 word report.
stuff like this and the lack of bicycle-friendly infrastructure is the reason why many are discouraged from biking
I had my bike stolen in front of police station in Walthamstow high street. They said they had no cctv footage after i had reported it. If this can happen next to a police station, what are the hopes for anything else???
officer. officer. I’ve just been mugged…
what kind of time frame are we talking here?
Slap some pro-Palestine stickers on your bike and a portrait of a little old lady and I’m sure you’ll get a flood of Met officers offering to track your bike down.
I assume they also don’t investigate car thefts from their car parks either for the same reason?
Would you have better luck reporting it to the local plod rather than to the BTP?
My understanding is that the BTP is primarily there to protect the railway. They’ll dress it up with fluffy language, but, as we see from their website, I think I’m probably correct.
“Our purpose
We’re proud to be the Guardians of the Railway, focused on the safety of the public.”
I wish entrapment was allowed in the UK law – police should deploy a few bikes around, monitor them to see if anyone nicks them, and lock up the offenders. Would send a pretty strong message
Always say it’s one hour, they’d have to look at the cctv from the moment it was stolen to find that it wasn’t.
Good to see my 40% tax is going to use
It seems to me that either the police do it or eventually we will get citizens doing it – and it is then incumbent on the police to stay out of the way of the citizens, else it would be the height of injustice. Very worrying.
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