Bicycle thefts (FOI ref: 669/26)

Request

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:

The total number of bicycle thefts reported in the following years:

I would be grateful if you could provide this information in the above formats within an excel spreadsheet. If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the cost and time involved, please provide advice and assistance, as to how I can refine my request.

Response

We do not have a broader/aggregated category for ‘bicycles’, and therefore we have provided data for all bike-relevant categories within the property description field.

The data has been obtained by searching the Property Status field ‘STOLEN’ and Property Description field ‘CONVEYANCE’, which has been further broken down into all bicycle-relevant categories within the property description field.

It is important to note that it is not mandatory to record property status and property description, and therefore, if this information has not been input by officers, it will not be recorded/ known to us or retrievable for the purposes of your request. Therefore, any results provided will not necessarily be inclusive or exhaustive of all records relating to bicycle theft, and may not provide a true representation. 

Please note that this data should be interpreted with caution. Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are considered when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.