Between May and September 2012, 1554 bikes were stolen that were registered with Bike Shepherd. These were broken down into three categories:
?Unregistered & untagged bikes where the owner registers the bike with Bike Shepherd after the bike was stolen
?Bikes registered with Bike Shepherd but not tagged with Pulse ID tags
?Bikes registered with Bike Shepherd and tagged with Pulse ID tags
Of the 1554 bikes stolen, 2% or 49 were returned to their rightful owner. At first glance, this may look like a low recovery rate.
However, of all bikes stolen, some were unregistered and therefore harder to trace, while others were just registered but not tagged. Both of these would keep recovery rates on the low side.
In addition, there’s no way to know how many owners of recovered bikes don’t report their recovered bikes to Bike Shepherd, which would also keep the recovery stats lower than normal.
What we do know is registered but untagged bikes drive two things – higher theft rates and lower recovery
1 Higher theft rates; high because the thief doesn’t know the bike is registered because there’s no tag and he steals it instead of moving on to easier prey;
2 Lower recovery rates; low because the police or Good Samaritans don’t know see a tag to check the bike in the first place to see if its stolen, and if so, alert the owner of its whereabouts.
In the third scenario, where a bike is registered and tagged, the real winners are the owners who had bikes registered and tagged with Bike Shepherd Pulse tags. Recovery rates were so high we had to double-check our figures! Of the 49 bikes recovered in our summer statistics, every one was registered and tagged with Bike Shepherd Pulse ID tag, which amounts to a 100% recovery rate.
they should go into politics with maths like this 😉