Bicycle at risk

In the book of the Irish writer Flen O'Brien "The Third Police" tells about the village, where the main occupation of the inhabitants is to steal each other bicycles, and the police are investigating these thefts. Today, half a century after those events, such crimes are very popular in Britain. In the province, according to rumors, the situation is not as bad as in big cities. In London, for example, 23 thousand bicycles were stolen over the past year. Almost every cyclist can share stories on this score. Here's what one student of Oxford University said:

- I participated in competitions in Oxford. I arrived on a bicycle to the sports center, put a bicycle nearby, locked. Actually, to be honest, the castle was cheap-for the good one, of course, it was necessary to buy better. In general, I put it there, looked - around the video cameras hang, well, I think everything is fine. I ran the distance, it took about twenty minutes. I’m returning, I look - there is no my bicycle. I looked around around, ran back and forth-maybe the thieves had not yet had time to hide, because very little has passed. But no, nobody and nothing. I went to the sports center, turned to the administration to check the video. It turned out that none of their cameras was aimed at parking bicycles. The question is, why? The cameras are aimed at car parking, to pedestrians - everywhere, in short. All four cameras are removed. What is the point? Still, the cars have alarm, and the bicycle has one castle, and it is easy to remove. Even good, metallic, you know, such, in the form of the letter D, - so, they can also be cut if desired.

Theft of bicycles is a business, apparently, organized. It is known that they are rarely stolen for personal use, more often in order to resell. According to the Oxford student, an experienced person, this has its own system:

- All this is sent to certain places, like Liverpool and Glasgow. In the end, all stolen bicycles are there. And then they are sold-on ebay, an Internet auction. Sometimes they disassemble and sell in parts. It happens in different ways: things like frames, for example, are more difficult to sell, there is a serial number on them. If you have stolen a bike, you must check on eBay - just enter your serial number and see if it will jump out.

The other my interlocutor regularly rides a bicycle to work from one end of London to the other. He told about the case of those that occur in the city daily.

- I work in the office on the southern shore of Thames. Behind the building we have a parking for employees bicycles, such an ordinary one, about 20 racks. Several times bicycles were stolen from there; The video cameras worked, but no one could catch. Therefore, many are reinsured - several locks are used. I admit honestly, I didn’t particularly strain about this, I thought who needed it, my bicycle is a collapse, no one would steal it. And one guy bought a cool bicycle for a thousand pounds from us - he took a loan at work. So, when we watched the video, there was this: these two pass by, under the very cameras - they can be clearly seen - one takes the rear wheel of my bicycle - I didn’t chained it, only the front, the other does the same with the front wheel and the frame of that guy. Then they attach my rear wheel to this expensive bicycle and fall off. They worked quickly-the whole thing was taken from them for some seconds of 70.

Such dexterity indicates that the case of criminals is put on a wide foot. The affected owner of a cheap bicycle agrees with this:

- These people know what they need. At work, we have repeatedly seen someone approaching the parking lot and rewrites what bicycles are there. These are such organized custom thefts, something like that. They steal a lot - about a year in our office of 10 pieces, it was gone.

This summer in London, bicycles were launched in London: parking is scattered throughout the city, where you can take a bicycle for a small fee, get to the right place and leave it at the nearest station. The creators of the project from the very beginning took care of the safety of cars - but the rental bicycles have practically dissolved in a year and a half. In Scotland Yard, there is a special unit of 30 police officers, the task of which is to prevent the theft of public bicycles. One of the main factors that ensure their safety is that the bicycles are these most simple quality, which means that they are unlikely to cost a bike market. To disassemble them to pieces would be a loss of time; It is believed that they will be sold mainly for weight, at the price of aluminum from which they are made.