Copy and paste from the Cycle Factory Post on Instagram:

PLEASE HELP 🙏 sound on!
Cycle Factory was burgled last night Monday 17.1.22 at 9pm. The main suspect brought his children along to help him case the shop at 3.54pm (Monday)! Before returning to break in with two other males. Six bikes have been stolen, five Cube ebikes and one Nukeproof. We need your help to like, share and comment on this post to help spread the word and help us identify this man 🙏. Please give it a like, make a comment and give it a share on all your socials. We are waiting to get the reg of what presumably is his own gunmetal grey VW Golf car shown. Please get in touch with any information or use crime number 13220028753
Thanks for your support,
Cycle Factory Team.
Bike details to follow

https://www.instagram.com/p/CY4jtOLKZmk/

*uckers.

Look at the geezer at 1.31 onwards and his coat compared to the ‘same’ geezer at the start of the footage.

Really good quality footage as well.

The police should be all over the Golf and the white van number plates.

Somebody must recognise him and the two kids with him.

Identifying the kids has to be the easiest angle for the cops. Bob into a few local schools and ask the office staff, job jobbed.

Seems a bit stupid to case the job during opening hours and then come back to do it wearing the same clothes!

hopefully it wont be long before that bloke is off the streets. pretty damming evidence.

Plot twist! The kids were stolen too and are just red (ha) herrings.

Let’s hope they find him and the bikes soon, he does seem remarkably easy to trace. Idiot.

Transit is taxed and insured

Schools kick out at 3:30 I assume still so that narrows the kids schools down.
That’s very brazen with the house over the road

Transit had some serious rust on a previous MOT!

Joking aside – it’s shit that the next generation of scum are used to case the joint. What’s the betting scroaty junior follows in his useless dad’s footsteps?

Depressing.

Transit had some serious rust on a previous MOT!

I’d like to think that a good thief would put fake plates on a van before a robbery but considering he seems not to have bothered to get changed or keep his face covered during the robbery I doubt it.

If your going to case a joint then the first item on the list is to check for video cameras.

**** all bike thieves (I had two bikes stolen almost exactly a year ago), and hope the bikes are recovered and the thieving scum are properly dealt with – either by the judicial system or coupla hard, pipe-hittin’ fellows who will go to work on the lads with a set of Bombers and a blow torch.

Having said that, at best it’s bad form and at worst possibly quite illegal, to post vids of the kids. Suggest you censor them out and repost.

Got to feel for the kids, what chance do they have with that scumbag as a father?

Great to see some actual good quality CCTV footage for a change, could see him clear as day.

I want to know what CCTV system/cameras that is because the quality is outstanding!

What a thicko though, wearing the same jacket (and shoes?) is when in a few hours earlier casing the shop. Moron.

Shouldn’t be hard for the coppers to solve this one (if they can be arsed). Just need to find out where Ronald Mc Donald sends his kids to school.

The f twit didn’t even wear a facemask when they cased the joint. I hope he gets hemorrhoids in jail.

That breaks my heart to see that little girl be involved in all this (in so far as part of the casing) – she looks very similar to my youngest daughter and I can’t imagine doing anything even remotely like that which would compromise her security and safety.

One word of advice for the OP who posted the Instagram post – just be mindful of GDPR/privacy regs, as publishing a video of a child on the internet without permission I think could be a little edgy.

F*”k GDPR and privacy laws being “broken”. The crime is the flippin robbery from a shop!

It’s the parent’s job to keep kids safe and protect their information. Don’t take the kids along to case a robbery if you don’t want them involved.

Poor kids.

just be mindful of GDPR/privacy regs

I can’t think how these would apply in this situation.

If the kiddiewinks are charged, then the footage should be removed.

@sas78 that as maybe, but emotion doesn’t change the fact that the child is innocent (until proven guilty) in all this, and has a right to privacy, in so far as she probably had no idea that she was about to have her face plastered on the internet related to the crime.

Have a reread of your comment, and maybe put yourself in the child’s shoes – I don’t need to run you through all the reasons why there are laws here to protect innocent kids.

If the bloke is indeed the suspect, then of course, he deserves everything he gets. But don’t single out the seemingly innocent little girl who appears to be no older than my 8 year old.

Just seen this. What a shitty thing to happen. Sam’s built that business up from bare bones and is just one of the nicest guys you’ll meet. Hope they catch the lot of them.

Absolute bunch of scumbag cretins, so panicky and breathing so hard his mask came away from his face, all the bikes will be too scratched up to sell when returned, the dropper post stanchion on the giga is probably knackered. If the police can’t catch him ASAP then they’re more useless than this pos, to not wear a mask with his kids earlier is so dumb and bringing an easily identifiable kid along plus staring into the camera and wearing the exact outfit has got to be the most braindead criminal in Britain, unless he is foreign and already on a ferry.😀

If leaving the kids identifiable helps catch the perp then so be it.

I hope they get caught. If only because they deserve it on account of stupidity. But also: **** bike thieves.

@Neil_Bolton thanks for the perspective, if you reread my post then you’ll see I do pity the kids and did think of them. I have a couple daughters that age and I feel empathy for them completely actually, I also had friends at school who had parents like this.

My crude point I was poorly articulating, was does that empathy for the kids trump the fact their father committed a serious crime against a business? Not in my view it doesn’t, but I can understand your point and agree to a certain extent.

I fully appreciate this could be seen as a callous way of viewing this,but I would counter that any reasonable observer would not taint the kids with the parents acts. Maybe identifying them might actually help the poor kids, who knows?

It’s easy for us all to sit and make suppositions, but the law is the law, just sometimes I think it is wrong.

@sas78 – appreciate the clarification; I also agree that one doesn’t trump the other, absolutely not, and it makes my blood boil that yet another bike shop has to deal with this. I think I wanted to separate the (hopefully) innocent child from the actual crime. To your point about helping the kid, you might well be right – but I feel the pain more from the innocence that kid has, and will lose.

Just sad really, all on top of an incredibly angering situation.

@Neil_Bolton a rare moment of STW agreement! 🙂

the child is innocent (until proven guilty) in all this, and has a right to privacy, in so far as she probably had no idea that she was about to have her face plastered on the internet related to the crime.

Is this a legal opinion or an ethical one?

I really don’t think there’s any legal issues with sharing the footage, though it is a long time since I studied media law.

If leaving the kids identifiable helps catch the perp then so be it.

The thing is that the children will be identifiable to the police (who it’s to be hoped will be pursuing the burglary) from the original footage. Once it’s up on social media it’s likely to get copied and shared and sooner or later someone from the kids’ schools are going to recognise them and give them a hard time (I’ve no idea about the legality of sharing the images with the children identifiable).

I do hope that the perpetrators get speedily apprehended!

@PJay this was my thinking also. The legality, as I mentioned, is a bit edgy – I didn’t say it was or was not legal – but more that its getting into a grey area.

All the while, your point is the real worry for me, if that little girl has (hopefully) no idea what was going on, then there is a degree of risk there, as you mention. My personal view is I would want to protect that child from any further harm – and that’s where I think the privacy element comes in.

The other scrotes, crack on, bring out the pitchforks.

https://www.caughtoncamera.net/news/cctv-legal-requirements-cctv-laws-explained/

“It is forbidden for CCTV operators to share footage of identifiable people with the media or on the internet for entertainment purposes. The only footage that is allowed to be released is if it’s to identify someone for purposes requested by the police.”

No mention of any differing rules for children. All this “you cant take pictures of me kids its illegal” can piss off back to mumsnet in my opinion.

However, I do question the use of the image of ANYONE who happened to be associated with the burglar in this manner. If he came in with his girlfriend/dad/gramdmother/whatever and there was no indication that they were involved in the subsequent crime my thoughts would be exactly the same, age is irrelevent.

There’s a public interest exception to GDPR for situations like crime?

Although I’d always be cautious.

My personal view is I would want to protect that child from any further harm – and that’s where I think the privacy element comes in.

Alternatively, they need to be identified so an assessment can be made by the appropriate agencies with some urgency.

GDPR ruels are a massive mess (european ones at least -the UK ones were until trumped by europe far better).

Anyway – if you’re concerned about kiddies being shown on camera / images shared online, or anyone for that matter, then how do outside news broadcasters get away with it? In the course of their reports they captured thousands of people who will not have given explicit permission to use “their image”.

As a lifeline Ginger (and proud), those children will be a doddle to identify. My father was once accused of scrumping with some school kids. The only thing the owner recalled was that one kid had red hair. You’ve already eliminated 97% of the population.

GDPR doesn’t necessarily imply regulations to restrict the sharing of such images, but it does include the right to be forgotten or removed.

Therefore, if you broadcast a video of a subject (you, me or anyone else), you would be well within your rights to ask for your image to be removed from any platforms and be ‘forgotten’.

This is an area that hasn’t seen much attention, but there is some interesting grappling going on with the technical debt around how organisations deal with images and video like this.

I think @big_n_daft covered it perfectly and said what I was trying to say – the right people need to step in and do the right thing to protect where there is any assessed risk to a child.

I’ll be surprised if the police haven’t got the guys name or nicked him already, its probably the easiest bike shop break-in to solve, take the kids photos into the schools and ask the staff if they are pupils there, checking local cctv will find the cars reg, the van was probably nicked or if they’re really dumb it’s a work van and only a few people have access to it so that might slow things down a tad.
I bet the guy is already in the database.

Those kids are in for some serious stick at school for years to come. Even more so when their dad is sent down. I imagine Mrs Scrote will be having a fit. But that won’t fix the kids.
Hopefully police get them soon.

Even with all the evidence they’ll be lucky to have the police expend that much resource on it, even if they find them they’ll more than likely never find the bikes, the transit will more than likely be cloned plates, unless they’re really dumb. Anyone found guilty will probably be 6 months max, serve 2 and back out, and that’ll be with them linked to a few more break ins and robberies.

Shop security doesn’t look too great for the stock they have, guessing they trusted the main gate being locked more than having a shutter or something a bit beefier at the door!

Anyone found guilty will probably be 6 months max, serve 2 and back out, and that’ll be with them linked to a few more break ins and robberies.

This is sadly true. Theft of bikes is not taken seriously.