Council Memories 3: the case of the lost bicycle trackers
For much of the New Labour government, they set the police and council priorities on crime reduction. Some made sense such as reducing burglary, others not so much like reducing garden sheds being broken into. I had many a discussion on why we were spending money and resources on tackling bicycle thefts. I am sure there was analysis behind the decision but it was never shared with me. These priorities were already in place when I arrived in the field of Crime & Disorder.
I purchased a load of cheap bike locks for just over a pound each and we gave them away to kids, schools and the community at events. A couple of pounds for a cheap lock seemed like a good investment if the kids actually used them - we had no idea if they did or did not. We gave them away and moved on, job done.
Manchester has a large student population, some of their bikes can cost a month's wage and are well worth stealing. Bikes were targeted by local organised gangs. A cheap bike lock was no barrier for bolt cutters, so we started to buy more expensive D-locks for students. These locks would require an angle grinder to remove. I think we were paying around £20 a lock. The money we had to tackle these priorities allowed us to seek new ways of reducing crime and come up with new ideas. We had plenty of money.
Someone in the team found a new idea online - microchips fitted inside bicycles. This allowed owners to report their bike stolen and to be contactable if recovered by the police. It was the same technology as used when 'chipping' your family cat or dog. If a bike was sold, owner information could be updated online. The theory was that a suspected stolen bike would be scanned by a handheld device and details of the owner would be accessed.
This microchip was housed inside a torpedo-shaped small metal tube, once in place, it could not be removed due to the design. To fit the device, the bike seat was removed and the torpedo was pushed into the opening of the bike's hollow frame, the seat was then refitted. Simple. From what I can recall, each torpedo cost £7. It would not stop bike thefts but would help police to confirm a particular bike was stolen and lead to the arrest of the person in possession.
We spent several years fitting these devices to students' bikes free of charge. We targeted specific events, community days and threshers weekends. Students love anything for free – I must also be a student at heart. Many took up the offer and registered their details online or we did it for them. Every quarter the council reported to the government how many had been fitted.
Did any of the above reduce bicycle thefts in Manchester? I have no idea. We did not care if it did or did not, that was not the point of the project. The point was to report back to the government that we had worked on the issue and had evidence to prove we did. Bike theft was not our priority – domestic burglary was our priority and rightly so. We funded full-time staff to reduce burglary, reducing bike thefts was just a box-ticking exercise added to my team's workload.
A few years after I took redundancy and set up my own charity to reduce youth crime, I was chatting to a police inspector at an event when bike thefts came up in conversation. I asked how the tracking of stolen bikes was going and if the microchips had any results? He looked at me with a blank expression. I explained the project and the thousands of bikes we had microchipped. His expression did not change. I advised him to speak to his colleagues about the project as it could help keep his bike thefts low. He said he would and we parted company.
I bumped into the same police inspector again a few months later. I asked him if he had inquired about the chipping project. He had. His feedback was not what I expected. The handheld scanners were expensive, only two were purchased by the council and given to the police. That was two scanners to cover 14 different policing neighbourhoods across Manchester. Both scanners were stored at the police HQ instead of at local police stations to keep them safe. Police officers had to transport a suspected stolen bike to the HQ to scan the bike. Of course, this meant that no one ever went to HQ to scan a bike, they were far too busy for this messing around. Over time both scanners were misplaced and had now disappeared. Their records showed that not one bike had ever been scanned.
This project ran for at least a few years and cost tens of thousands of pounds. It had not worked because no one had thought through the final piece of the puzzle. No one thought about the practicalities of scanning bikes by busy police officers who have a million other things to do, their convenience was given no thought. The project still may have failed to reduce bike thefts even if a hundred scanners had been purchased and stored locally. But then at least it would have failed because the project was poor, not because of incompetence.
The incompetence was the zero monitoring and evaluation built into the project - it was as if no one cared if it worked or not. This is at the very heart of the problem of local government and why they continually underperform. Any desire of delivering change to lead to better service is beaten out of staff over years. The organisation does not want to change, it protects the status quo.
A simple monitoring process would have brought to light the failure of this project at a very early stage and changes could have been made. But no, the failure of the project only came to light when an ex-employee mentioned to a copper about a project he use to work on several years before.
But do not worry, it does not really matter, it was only taxpayers' money.
(Please consider becoming a paid member of my substack for earlier access to articles, draft writings from my books, and premium articles. Or if you were forwarded this article, then consider signing up for free – you still get lots of articles!)