Feddit.onlineBike thefts at stations 'decriminalised'
sabreW4K3www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jm3wxvlkjo
cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/26700013
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HossenfefferGreat way to get more cars on the road, good job big brains!
okwithmydecayWe definitely want to get more people cycling. Drivers who park at the station are also affected, as the article states:
Car thefts will not be investigated if the vehicle has been left for more than two hours
HumanPenguin2 hours. Completely defies the point of having the racks. I can understand bikes left for days considered an issue. But not covering actual daily commute times for working people. The main purpose of public transport,
MPs need to come down on this. It’s utterly disgusting that BTP has jurisdiction and has decided independently what they consider to be their fucking job.
Honestly the only thing commuters can do is write to MPs.
BlackmistEven if it was left for days, the act of scanning through a video looking for the point the bike arrives and is then no longer there is fucking trivial.
I wonder if they’d adopt the same two hour window if I smashed into a ticket machine and stole all the cash.
DarrenMy lad’s bike was nicked from a train station a few months back. He’d left it there, locked in the rack while he was at work. You know, pretty standard stuff.
BTP told him they weren’t going to investigate it because it was left for longer than 2 hours.
I’m still fucking angry about that.
edit: Oh, just read the article, and yeah, that’s exactly what it’s about. Cunts.
Too busy harassing people they think may be fare dodging to protect private companies bottom lines whilst said companies continue to raise prices and drastically decrease the quality and reliability of the service.
ACAB. Fuck the police and fuck the useless fucking train companies.
Won’t do anything about personal theft, fuck you should have had insurance. Skip out on a 2 quid tram fare though? They’re all over that.
This country is ridiculous.
DiplomjodlerSorry, lads, the coppers are too busy persecuting people who make critical comments about the government.
Don’t forget the landed gentry’s property rights which are sacrosanct. Us peasants owning actual stuff on the other hand can fuck right off.
Oh hell no. Decriminalize drugs, homelessness, or petty theft from major chain stores with insurance for that crap.
Now, bicycle theft? That strains my dedication to opposing state violence.
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queermunist she/herOkay, but we aren’t going to fix the social safety net. Nothing ever gets fixed. So, since that’s never going to happen, this basically just means cyclists don’t have the same property rights as motorists.
We already have fewer rights than anyone else on the road, now we have fewer rights off the road too.
If they decriminalized car theft then at least it would be fair. This is just a way to ensure cyclists stay second class commuters. We aren’t even people to them, just annoying obstacles for motorists.
According to the article, BTP won’t investigate Car theft for cars being left more then 2hours.
Any bikes stolen worth less than £200 will not be investigated, neither will car thefts if the vehicle has been left for more than two hours.
Oh. Well. Hell yeah! That totally flips me around on the issue. 😮💨
my father gave me a lesson like this when i was young when my bike was stolen and now i only buy bikes that can be folded up and taken with me everywhere i go.
it’s also bizarre that train conductors/authorities still count it as a regular bike even though it doesn’t take up the same amount of room and a traditional bike.
All of this is true, but I still have zero sympathy for bike thieves. Go steal memory cards from a supermarket or something, leave other regular folks property alone you fucks.
HiddenLayer555So smashing car windows is getting decriminalized too right? RIGHT?
What the fuck. Horse thieves used to get the death penalty.
Optional registration with a bright visible yellow sticker in Belgium https://mybike.belgium.be/
Does it work? Who knows but at least signals to anybody who might want to still your bike that you went the extra mile to prevent theft and you will consequently be annoying enough to signal it at stolen wherever you can. Sure it can be removed somehow (Dremel I guess) but it’s extra work that will look very suspicious on a “normal” sale.
FWIW it’s also free, you just request the sticker on their Website and receive it by mail few days after.
Plug for bikeindex.org, which I have heard used to actually recover stolen bikes in some cases.
“The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm and providing a visible presence across the network.
That argument is so dumb. Say the bike owner was away for ten hours, from 6:00 to 16:00 o’clock.
What you need to do is called ‘bisection’. At 6:00, the bike is there. At 16:00, it isn’t. You take half if that interval, which is 11:00. You look at 11:00, whether its there. If yes, you look at the mid between 11:00 and 16:00. If no, between 6:00 and 11:00.
Then hours are 600 Minutes, which means that after ten halvings you are down to the exact minute where the theft happened, and can watch the thief.
It’s the same method as finding a page number in a large book.
As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.
Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.
My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.
The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.
boredsquirrel (he)Lol I would do that instinctively I think
Almost every thought process you think is common sense has a name, because it isn’t common sense to everyone, and needs to be taught to some. Everyone has their blind spots.
Hmmm… 🤔 what about stopping investigate car thefts as well? Let the car owners (or their insurance) find PIs themselves.
In a list of crimes the BTP will not investigate, it also said thefts on trains should only be reported if the passenger knows the exact carriage.
Any bikes stolen worth less than £200 will not be investigated, neither will car thefts if the vehicle has been left for more than two hours.
Way ahead of you. They already did.
ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠I want to say I’m outraged, but outrage required an element of surprise. So I guess I’m just pissed.
infinitesunriseSmells like the cops strongarming the public for funding increases. It’d be better for the railway to just hire bike concierge.
novemberBut if you abolish the police, who will come help you when your bike is stolen???
Seems like automated video processing could dramatically reduce staff time required to “watch video”. Load up the start, draw a box around the bike, then software finds time when bike is removed (or flags smaller number of substantial changes for human review).
I mean there’s several more efficient options than watching 1x video all the way until the bike is stolen. Just looking at hourly timepoint from placement and then narrowing from there (sped up) would be fairly straightforward. Mathematically half points would be most efficient. So like 0-800 check 400 if bikes gone check 200 if not check 600, etc using half points you’d be able to find the steal pretty quickly.
Excellent point. Or if the video is processed similarly to something like YouTube you could just drag the slider along until the bike is gone. Maybe I just don’t understand the argument for only investigating thefts that occur in a short time period…
The argument is that they’re too lazy and seemingly too stupid. My point is more so you can catch the crime even without relying on something like an AI. This is a problem with the person not the tools available.
The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains…
Funny they say this, implying they’ll be putting a BTP officer or two at every station to keep a lookout. Obviously that’s not going to happen.
I’m not sure of the politics around the BTP’s funding, but this pullback on responsibilities smells like they are short on officers or money or both.
“Our experience tells us at an early stage that there are some crimes that are unlikely to ever be solved – such as those without a clear estimate of time or location for the incident or if there is a lack of CCTV or witnesses.
“The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm and providing a visible presence across the network.”
Well which is it, a lack of CCTV footage or a lack of time/police resources? They seem to flipping back and forth between these 2 excuses, even when camera evidence is available.
“The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV… the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm.”
You mean like having them stand there in the station with dogs to stop people for suspected drug possession? Y’know, “harmful” crimes. I know that’s not the only thing they ever do but they certainly do waste so much of their time with pointless stuff like that, at least in certain cities
Exactly what we need aswell, people being more discouraged to use bikes and forcing people even more into getting cars and making our already overcrowded and dangerous roads even more overcrowded and dangerous. Wonder if there’s an easy solution to stop people taking bikes from the bike lock up areas? Like hmm maybe having them all be properly secure and the station employing one or two people to keep watch? Nah silly idea…
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Protect the private train companies bottom line.
Social control and protection of property. (Not ours, though)
Protect the rich?
They’re in place to artificially inflate the donut economy.
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Ehh, half of 4 dozen of one, two dozen of the other. You know what, just make it 6 dozen to go
Interesting. Then they’ll stop investigating other vehicle theft, too, right?
Also, if you are going to “decriminalize” crimes like that, then at least “decriminalize” actions taken by people to prevent or recover their stolen property.
I mean, if you’re stealing it back, it’s also decriminalized?
It’s rare to see the law work in the victim’s favour, so stealing back your own bike would probably land you in jail (in North America, at least).
…but wait at least two hours first.
In the Netherlands we. have. bike. theft.
Quién inlived there I had my bike stolen at least once a year, I had a good grand total of over 10 bikes stolen in my life there
Stealing bikes is still a crime.
If it’s toouxh then basically police worries less about trivial stuff like soft drug use
Somehow I’ve never had that problem. Maybe it helps that I ride cheap-looking bikes (and use two locks when it’s for a longer time)
What is wrong with the UK? They don’t have a problem with putting video surveillance like the EU does, are they that incompetent?
Local cops are absolute trash. When my house got broken into 3x, each time I was home, local cops did nothing. My dog protected me and drove off the intruders. People were casing my house, because someone shot and killed my dog in my backyard after the 3rd unsuccessfully break in. Still local police did nothing. I’ve had good experiences with the state police troopers in my area. I work in a NYS agency and my bike is parked right outside the state capital where there are cameras all the fuck over. When my bike got stolen the NYS police reviewed the footage, found the guy, (who was already out on parole,) and sent him right back to prison because he committed another crime and violated his parole. My bike was never recovered. I was able to file a FOI request to get the perps info, and eventually get a civil judgement against him. It’s a mixed bag, but you all should be agitating like hell to get shitty cops and shitty police chiefs removed.