"Theft has become legal": Police close stolen bike case a day after it was taken from outside Scotland Yard HQ, despite CCTV cameras and tracker showing location

Imagine your stolen bike had a tracker that could inform the police of the exact location the thief had taken it to. Then imagine that said theft happened at a central London spot surrounded by CCTV cameras. Finally, to top it off, imagine your bike was stolen from a rack directly outside Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. 

In this scenario you might feel fairly confident about the aforementioned police force being able to investigate the crime, perhaps even tracing where the stolen bike is and who took it? You probably would have also felt fairly confident it wouldn't be stolen from such a location in the first place.

Well, having been the victim of a bike theft in those exact circumstances and with the case subsequently closed by the Met one day later "without further evidence", anti-crime campaigner Dr Lawrence Newport was left to conclude that "theft has become legal in Britain".

Uploading a video to social media, Dr Newport explained how he locked a bike on a Westminster street outside Scotland Yard. When the bike was stolen he reported the crime and provided the police its location via the tracker, the bike also having been left in the proximity of three CCTV cameras.

A day later, he was told "without further evidence" the case would be closed.

"Is theft legal in Britain? We had our bike stolen right under the shadow of Scotland Yard and police did nothing about it," Dr Newport said in the video that has been viewed more than 1.6m times on Twitter/X since yesterday.

"With trackers installed and our bike locked under the view of Parliament, CCTV and the headquarters of British police, what more could we possibly have done? We called the police, told them where the bike was, and a day later they told us without further evidence they were closing the case. They hadn't checked the CCTV, they'd done nothing.

"Police can't act, stretched to breaking point, drowning in process and paperwork unable to recruit, theft has become legal in Britain. Meanwhile our politicians seem to have given up on police, on courts, on crime, and criminals know it."

We left a bike with GPS trackers somewhere we assumed it would be safe...

Right outside Scotland Yard.

It was quickly stolen.

Police didn't check CCTV, couldn't go to a "moving" GPS signal or one at an address

Government has given up and police can't focus on rampant theft. pic.twitter.com/RQdOo13Sp8

— Dr Lawrence Newport (@pursuitofprog) December 1, 2024

At the end of the video he explains how, having taken his story to the Telegraph newspaper, the Met subsequently got back in touch to say they would review the CCTV and tracker evidence.

"It seems if you want to get a hold of your bike, it is best to call the national press," Dr Newport added.

He was promoting the Crush Crime petition, however the warning that bike theft has been effectively decriminalised is far from a new concern. In January, the Liberal Democrats made that same claim as it emerged that stats show 89 per cent of reported cases go unsolved.

> Three quarters of Brits don't expect police to bother investigating bike thefts

Bike theft has been in the news lately after two high-profile cases saw cyclists track down their own stolen bikes, the Guardian's former media editor Jim Waterson locating his family's stolen cargo bike via a discreet Apple AirTag.

"It immediately became apparent that the Met Police, weighed down on a Friday evening with a huge number of other calls, did not want to get involved," Waterson explained.

"If it's cycle theft you probably need to expect to solve your own crimes," he concluded, having undertaken a laborious five-hour task of tracking it down.

"In a parallel universe, I'm still waiting for the Met Police's follow-up call, and my bike is long gone in the back of that car, possibly to be sold on Facebook Marketplace or resprayed and sent abroad," he said. "The Met Police, short on resources, won't attend even if you know which block of flats contains your stolen bike.

"In the end I got incredibly lucky and got (most of) my bike back, by spending five hours staking out local streets and buildings. Others won't have as much luck."

That story came not long after another cyclist saw his stolen bike on Gumtree and made sure their case was "difficult to ignore" for the police, by tracking down the culprit within 48 hours and guiding officers right to his doorstep, leading to his arrest and a criminal charge.

A 21-year-old man has been arrested and charged with handling stolen goods after police accompanied the cyclist to the thief's flat to "keep the peace".

> Cycling UK hails "clever" policing after bait bicycle used to track down £130,000 bike theft gang in one shift

Last week, we reported that Cambridge topped the latest list of UK cycle theft hotspots, new crime data analysis revealed – as the city's large student population and cycling culture was blamed for "thriving" bike theft environment.