Police force admits bike thefts "unlikely to ever be solved" after spoof sign pokes fun at station's "Bicycle Redistribution Point"

Some kind of link is a good idea (your national train card is used in many facilities in NL - indeed you can even hire bikes with that also).

For the UK of course this only if authorities accept that it needs staff and preventing theft (never mind dealing with it if it happens) is important (also see info here).

No AI face recognition or data mining is required. The technology that best reduces theft is: a locked door. Look at the top photo in the article. Stick a flipping door there and you're well on the way to having solved the problem.

That's part. My bike was stolen from behind a locked door - in fact that just gave them a nice workspace as the lock was bypassable and the bike store unobserved.

The missing part is alert people - staff - prepared to do something.
And police prepared to attend as it may be too much to hope the staff are prepared for violence.

Locks - including those in doors - just slow thieves down or make their accessing something obvious. They're in part a delay mechanism giving people time to respond.

biking59boomer wrote:

Bike thefts have never been a police priority, nor will they ever be, especially with the amount of violent and other serious crime there is now.

Agree to the first part, but let's not get scared by the headlines.  The picture is more complex when you look closer but I think since you were a lad violent crime has gone down, even as reporting has (generally) gone up and more things are considered a crime - especially sexual violence.

biking59boomer wrote:

Nor will our councils provide the kind of secure bike parking that cyclists in the Netherlands have given the financial trouble that many of them are in.

Probably true although that's "because politics" - it's substantially cheaper than building/fixing road infra and economically this is missing a trick [1] [2].   (If only they could get the numbers cycling up - which of course isn't easy at all).

biking59boomer wrote:

We need to take more responsibility for our own security instead of relying on others. The following are a few simple steps we can all do:-

Most of this is reasonable advice - and if you have a very regular route the "get together with others" advice is good.  For general use you missed what I now consider the best advice - just avoid any bike you value appearing on a thief's radar.  The other way round - any bike you think might get stolen (e.g. you park and leave in many urban areas, or in a "secure bike store" or your shed) shouldn't be one you miss.

If someone wants to take it all the CCTV / recovery / police stuff won't help at all.

For a bike you like simply never be far from your bike.  So it lives inside your house (maybe your room?), comes into your office with you / the shop etc,  OR ensure the bike is cheap, ideally 2nd hand, certainly old and unfashionable and with low-tech parts.  It should visibly be crappy / grubby and ideally rusty or damaged-looking.

I go for the first strategy most of the time, I admit, I do like bikes more than 100 quid ... but if I have to leave my bike anywhere in public for more than an say an hour (in daylight!) I take my beater bike.

For the same reason I would avoid a particularly good lock (unless you also have the bike securely inside).  Certainly, cable ones will barely defeat young kids and most can be cut silently.  I wouldn't go much further though - if someone wants the bike (you didn't make it look more crap than the next bike) there's almost no lock that will stop them (angle grinders).  A few hundred quid of chopped locks will just be extra rain on your parade.

And there are a few loons who may trash your bike / take parts "for the lolz" anyway.

I very much doubt they care (or to be fair - they don't see it's their responsibility to tackle).

Plus this is the system that brought us "if the driver didn't actually hit you (and indeed sometimes if they did but you're not dead or missing limbs) then you are not a victim of crime but just a witness"!

(Presumably that could be fixed with a small tweak in the law or maybe even just some direction to the police, given that the offense of "assault" doesn't require contact?  Obviously nobody would think of charging close-passing drivers with assault though - that would be a total lack of common sense!)

hawkinspeter wrote:

I take it they're not up-to-date with crime fighting methods such as using a tracked "honey-pot" bike?

FTFY

Sriracha wrote:

Also, the throwaway suggestion at the end there that the police aren't actually that bothered about bicycle theft because there will always be a more serious crime to deal with it's not an issue that will get PCCs re-elected.

There's also the inference that bobbies on the beat are actually achieving something useful. My understanding is that the evidence suggests patrolling is a pretty inefficient use of police time - that wandering around aimlessly hoping that you bump into a criminal is not actually very effective. 

Certainly when it comes to bike theft at stations, it would appear that whatever level of "visible presence" there is, is woefully inadequate at preventing crime. And thieves knowing that there is going to be essentially zero investigation after-the-fact no doubt contributes to the lack of deterrent. 

I think the arguments are that it a) make people "feel more secure" b) perhaps deters the odd criminal and c) ensures police are "in touch with what's happening on their streets" (e.g. it serves an intelligence-gathering / awareness-raising function).

I don't know but I suspect that apart from (a) those are probably of limited value indeed.  And currently may be hard to measure against objectives?  But it can be an easy deliverable for politicians to quiet a major source of complaints e.g. "I've never seen any police round here..." / "They spend all their time filling in forms not chasing criminals..."

The last part may be true - likely paperwork and procedural requirements continually increase (because courts and lawyers, new standards and more laws).  But merely kicking the police out of the office doesn't fix that.

So sadly it may be something there is both pressure to make the police do AND this may actually reduce the effectiveness of the police detecting and dealing with crime.

belugabob wrote:

Y... you'd hope they'd be familiar with the binary search method,which reduces the required time, enormously.

I'd hope that they are processing the video with machine learning to identify all likely thefts given the behaviours of the miscreants. However it is the Police Service so they probably don't have the money to do that..

It does require at least some 'I' to be able to deploy 'AI' effectively.

Not always as the ML models can be provided already trained for reuse, thus avoiding the training process where that 'I' is required because it's fundamentally a manual correction of the model results until the accuracy (correction avoidance) reaches an acceptable level.

Fully accept that the local police service you have to deal with would have no money or interest in ML.

You would be justified to point out that trained ML wil do 99% of that assessment work so they can just put their feet up as usual  

Presumably the police are worried by competition from not-terribly-smart machine learning?  You'd think they'd be in tune with "mechanically following an opaque process" but presumably that doesn't offer sufficient "operational flexibility"? (Example: "no, I have no idea who is the driver in that picture of Fred Smith from the club clearly driving his car bearing his registration plate two inches from a cyclist; there's no evidence to proceed").

What really stands out is the contrast when people (as have posted here) do discover the odd cyclist or road safety enthusiast amongst the police who does in fact take this seriously and applies the letter of the law.