The wrong kind of theft

Avon and Somerset Police have staged a publicity stunt designed “to encourage members of the public to call 999 as soon as they [see] a crime taking place”, as the BBC website puts it.

The stunt involves officers pretending to steal bikes and filming the action as passers-by walk on without challenging the “thief”. A nice idea, but yet again there’s a massive failure of communication between the police and the public. In response to the news story, one of my friends on Twitter asked:

But then, what is the utility in calling police to report bicycle theft? In my experience they have no interest in investigating.

Another added:

My bike was stolen from outside College once: they said they'd only check CCTV for murders, not bikes. :-/

But according to the police,

We are constantly on the lookout for bike thieves but we also need the community to be vigilant and to call us if they see a crime happening.

So who’s right? Are the police on the trail of the bike thieves, unaided by an apathetic public? Or are the public reporting these thefts but being ignored by an apathetic police force?

Well...both sides are right, if you accept that they’re talking about completely different things. In a previous post about the police, I wrote:

I know that police procedure differentiates between crimes happening right this minute and crimes that happened at some point recently. But if you come back from holiday to find your house burgled, you won’t necessarily appreciate why that’s different from seeing burglars leaving your house. You just know it’s a serious, upsetting crime and it’s happened to you. Public education about the difference between “emergency” and “non-emergency” would make a big difference. There would be fewer complaints about police responding too slowly and fewer unnecessary 999 calls.

Avon and Somerset Police, like all UK police forces, make a very clear and important distinction between reporting a crime in progress and reporting a crime that happened some time before you came on the scene. It’s obvious why: if the perpetrators are still in the area or even still at the scene, it’s a lot easier to catch them.

I would argue that most British people miss this distinction, however clear it is to the police. Sadly, most people’s experience of reporting a theft is of reporting an item that’s been stolen from them, some time after the fact. To the police, the crime is a non-emergency and the chances of solving it have already plummeted. To the victim, the crime is a new and upsetting thing that’s just happened to them, and police indifference adds insult to injury. My experience of having my bike wheel stolen is just one example of how this mismatch plays out.

Why does this matter? Well, you can try to shock the public about its own apathy by filming people ignoring a staged bike theft. But that doesn’t work if large swathes of the public already have personal experience of police apathy. If people don’t understand the distinction between reporting a crime in progress and reporting a crime that’s already happened, they’re not necessarily going to grasp that there is a special procedural reason for the desk sergeant to redirect an upset crime victim to a phone line without a word of sympathy.

It matters too because it matters how we treat victims of crime in our society. As well as being the people to (in theory) catch and arrest the perpetrators of crime, the police are often the first point of contact for crime victims. Some sympathy is in order, even if you don’t have a snowflake’s chance of solving the crime. In fact, sympathy is especially in order if you don’t have a snowflake’s chance of solving the crime.

I should add that I do also have experience of reporting a bike theft in progress (or nearly in progress). Last winter, I saw a man behaving suspiciously around a set of bike stands in Oxford. He was checking literally every bike to see if it had been left unlocked. I challenged him in a friendly way – something along the lines of “Having trouble finding your bike?” - as a way of getting a good look at his face. He was wearing quite unusual clothes too, so I knew I could give a good description. I also felt sure that as soon as I left, he would steal a bike from the stands.

So I walked out of earshot and used my mobile phone to dial Thames Valley Police on the non-emergency number, which took a while because that number is shared by several police forces and Thames Valley was fifth on the list. Once I was connected, I thought I was speaking to someone based in Oxford, so I gave fairly detailed directions. I turned out to be speaking to someone who’d never even been to Oxford, hadn’t heard of any of the landmarks I named and couldn’t spell any of the street names I gave. They also demanded lots of details about me before I could get on with reporting what I’d seen. The conversation took ages. I’m sure that by the time we’d finished talking, the man had nicked a bike and scarpered. My hands were numb from the cold. They said they would send a car to check it out, but I’m not sure that they really did. Maybe I should have dialled 999, but that seemed like overkill when I hadn’t actually witnessed him taking anybody’s bike. Anyway, the experience put me off reporting anything similar in the future.

What can police do to make people more likely to report bike thefts when they see them? I’d start by working on their attitude towards the people who are already reporting bike thefts, even if it is, in their eyes, the wrong kind of theft.