Oh dear, you have got a bee in your bonnet. Nicking bikes has always happened, regardless of the ‘bigger picture’. That will still happen, quite often from people’s homes.Are you being deliberately obtuse? People have been asking for better policing for years but funding hasn’t been there. Have you not noticed there are fewer police stations now than 20 years ago? Have you not noticed fewer police out and about? Probably not. Visible policing is the biggest deterrent to crime on the streets.You might have missed the figures announced this morning about homicides in London. Each one costs the Met about £800,000 to investigate, which gives you some idea of where money is going. You losing your bike isn’t really a concern to them.I think you are clutching at straws a bit to correlate bike theft with organised crime. The proceeds of stealing and selling on a bike aren’t going to be significant , despite the claims by some about the values of their bikes. Of course, there’s quite a lot of drug dealing that goes on using bikes, so maybe that’s what you are getting at.You might not understand how crime and justice works in this country. It’s more complex than simply identifying a perpetrator. There’s a whole process that has to be followed, and even at the end of that there’s no guarantee of conviction or custodial sentence. For most career criminals the punishment really doesn’t act as a deterrent. I used to work in the criminal justice system and have seen it first hand.Apart from vigilante groups protecting those precious bicycles what solutions are you suggesting? Cutting off hands perhaps? Locking offenders up and throwing away the key? Or is it just that you want lots more scarce public money spent on protecting your personal property? That would be selfish, wouldn’t it?As I said, perhaps you and some of the other cyclists here should join the police and fight these heinous criminals first hand.
Simon Hayes ● 526d