Bike Theft data 2020-2025

Request

1. How many bike thefts have been reported for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial year’s instead of calendar years, please indicate.

2. How many of these stolen bikes have been recovered and returned to their owners? Please provide the response for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial year’s instead of calendar years, please indicate.

3. How many arrests/convictions have there been relating to the stolen bikes? Please provide the response for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial year’s instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Response

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An analyst within this unit has conducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the following data and explanation regarding their search criteria:

Criteria used :–

SYP & crime only filter,   Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2020 and 31/08/2025,   HO Sub Group Name is equal to / is in BICYCLE THEFT

Please note :–

• Extracted on 02/09/2025. Data from CONNECT crime only. This is a live recording system and may be subject to change.
• Data for Q1 is Distinct Count of Crimes for Bike Thefts, not number of bikes.
• Data for Q2 is Count of Pedal bikes against their Property Status – note that the property class has been filtered to bikes only
• 2025 data for both questions is from January-August inclusive.

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

I approached our Custody team who have provided the following:

The figures are based custody records that match on the following criteria:

• Arrest Date falls between 01/01/2020 and 31/08/2025.
• Contains the reason for arrest of “Theft – Of Pedal Cycle”.

Please note:

• The count is based on arrests, not convictions.
• The count is based on the number of times an individual has been arrested for Theft – Of Pedal Cycle on a custody record.  An individual can be arrested more than once, for the same reason, on the same record.
• The figures only include records where bike theft was the substantive offence.  It doesn’t include records where a bike has been stollen as part of another offence (e.g. a residential or business burglary).
• This is not a count of unique individuals.  This is because an individual could be linked to multiple custody records.  Therefore, where the same individual is linked to multiple records that meet the criteria, they could be counted multiple times.
• The date period used for ‘2025’ covers between 01/01/2025 and 31/08/2025.