Nice to see police doing a good job

doublem_1

At first I thought the headline was a bit extreme but looking reading the article I can't praise the copper any more. And nor could the guy being stopped. Looked like it was a guy wearing normal clothes and no helmet on an expensive bike (probably a roadie). And what with a few thefts the copper stopped him to check the bike out. All was well but I thought a bit of good news would brighten peoples spirits.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-22639683

Wirral_paul

Good on the cyclist for taking it in the right manner too - and for giving the cops the good publicity that can only do everyone some good (other than the thieving scrotes). If some nice publicity like that also encourages other forces to encourage their officers to also make a few stop checks - then its all good news as far as i'm concerned. 8)

elderone

Fair play,if it catches one of the toe rag thieves then it,s worth it.

dmclite-3.0

Was he riding a Triban 3 from Decathlon by any chance ?

TheSmithers

I wish all police were as shrewd and concerned for cyclists as this one. Top bloke!

In London, they couldn't give a $hit if my experience is anything to go by. I recently had my bike stolen from within a secure courtyard at the back of the building where I work. There's a security gate and 24 hr CCTV in operation. The problem is, whenever someone goes in or out of the gate, it remains open for quite some time before automatically closing. We've had a number of bikes stolen as opportunist thieves take advantage of this. I reported my bike stolen and was given a crime number etc. The landlord of our building will only release CCTV footage if requested by the police, so when a week had passed and I'd not heard anything, I called the officer in charge of my case to find out what was going on, only to be told the case had been closed! If that's not bad enough, the reason it was closed quite frankly had me dumbfounded! Since my bike could have been stolen anytime between 9am and 5:30pm, the police are not prepared to sift through the CCTV, even though I'm 100% certain it would have caught the thief in action! Apparently, there's a new policy in place whereby CCTV will only be examined if it's within a 20 minute period of the crime being committed.

Make of that what you will.

MountainMonster

While all of these stories suck about bikes getting stolen, you just need good insurance and not to worry so much. With the amount of bike thefts that happen on a daily basis, in London alone, they would be sifting through years worth of CCTV footage to find people, which is not a good use of police time.

TheSmithers

Having adequate insurance is not the point! It's not the money. The bike wasn't worth much, but it had sentimental value. Besides, I already had a bike stolen inside of a year of this one, which I claimed on.

Yes, bike thefts are rife in London; there are probably more bikes here than in any other town or city in the UK. All the more reason why it should be taken more seriously and more resources allocated to bike crime. On the one hand, you have Boris Johnson pledging to spend millions on improving bike safety, routes through London and various other initiatives to get people out of their cars. On the other, you have the police saying there's not enough resources to examine some CCTV footage, which would have certainly caught the thief red handed. What utter rubbish! If I had that CCTV footage, I could isolate the time of my crime in 5 minutes! I know they have bigger fish to fry, but what a f*cking waste of space!

kilo

TheSmithers wrote:

On the other, you have the police saying there's not enough resources to examine some CCTV footage, which would have certainly caught the thief red handed. What utter rubbish! If I had that CCTV footage, I could isolate the time of my crime in 5 minutes! I know they have bigger fish to fry, but what a f*cking waste of space!

So the police will remove somebody from more important duties to trawl through cctv of an insecure yard where you left your bikes, but first they'll have to request it from the owners, possibly get a statement for continuity purposes producing the tape / disc, there's a chance the cctv may pick the theft up but i wouldn't be surprised if the camera didn't (cctv at our place looks good but is crap in reality) and if there is an image, perhaps the thief, being professional will make some attempt to conceal his identity, a baseball cap, innocuous common tracksuit etc etc or will have clocked the cctv and kept out of sight as much as possible so again more wasted effort. Even if they get an image with a face shot what do you think they are going to do with that, there's no facial recognition database for minor theft, circulate it on crimewatch? Caught red handed - no

NELLY2488

The thieving toe rags will always nick bikes if they want them! I am only surprised that they haven't started knocking us off the bikes to nick them!! Well done to the bobby and lets hope others follow his example.