BREAKING THE CYCLE
Bike theft is far from a uniquely Winnipeg problem, but other Canadian cities are having
more success reducing numbers and reuniting owners with their wheels
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/2023/05/05/breaking-the-cycle-4
JEN Sjodin never expected to be sending her 13-year-old son pedalling down a criminal path.
But the Winnipeg mom was out of luck when it came to retrieving his $400 bike with the help of city police, so she and her husband took matters into their own hands, and their son Dawson’s legs.
He’d saved for months to buy the grey and neon-green Giant Talon last fall. Not long after getting his new wheels, he rode to the Walmart on Taylor Avenue and locked his bike to the rack near the front doors. He was in and out of the store in about 15 minutes, and found his cable lock cut. The bike was gone.
Sjodin filed a police report with the Winnipeg Police Service, posted a notice on Facebook and scoured online classified ads in hopes of finding the bike. Six days later, Dawson spotted it on Kijiji.
“We called the police non-emergency line and talked with someone after hours,” she says. “They suggested to call back the next day, provide any updates to the police report and the police would check it out.”
The next day was going to be too late. Instead, Sjodin, her husband and two brothers concocted a plan to steal the bike back. She messaged the seller and posed as an interested customer. When they met up, Dawson took the bike for a test ride and pedalled directly to his uncle’s house.
Dawson got his bike back, but the experience left him shaken.
“For my son, it has made him much more afraid to lock up his bike,” Sjodin says. “He doesn’t think it’s safe to lock it up anywhere.”
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The experience is one thousands of Winnipeg cyclists — from young kids to seniors — are all too familiar with, some repeatedly.
Police say 1,665 bikes were reported stolen across the city in 2022. The real number, however, is likely many times higher; multiple studies suggest “small” property crimes often go unreported. Many victims won’t bother to involve police because of the time involved and minuscule odds of getting their stuff back.
And although the city launched an online bike registry in 2018, it has proven mostly ineffective at reuniting owners and their rides — particularly when compared to measures implemented in other Canadian cities — say cycling advocates, bike-shop owners and even police.
About 400 cycles are recovered in Winnipeg annually, but less than 10 per cent of them make their way home. In 2022, 386 bikes were recovered, and 15 were returned to their owners, according to the city’s community services department. In Edmonton, 23 per cent of recovered bikes are returned to their owners.
More than 17,000 bikes are registered in the Winnipeg system, which combined existing paper registrations from 1995 with web records. Of that number, more than 7,500 went on the registry between 2018 and 2021.
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Tom Babin, a Calgary author, active-transportation advocate and “cyclist in chief” at online magazine Shifter, says bike theft breaks trust in communities, creates economic difficulties and fuels other crimes.
“There isn’t a lot of trust between citizens and police when it comes to bike theft. There’s an assumption everywhere that the cops will do nothing about it, and they’re probably right. The police are busy,” he says.
When filing police reports and registering bikes fail to show results, people such as Sjodin may take drastic measures when they see systems not working.
“Can you imagine celebrating other crimes for stealing something back?
Stealing your bike back might be good at the moment, but for society, it’s a terrible way of approaching it,” Babin says.
Police say they understand that people may turn to vigilantism when they feel the police aren’t helping in their time of need.
“I don’t blame people for doing that. Of course, we can’t recommend that people take matters into their own hands. But I understand the frustration,” says WPS Sgt. Yvan LeTourneau.
Winnipeg cyclists can pay $7.35 and input their bike’s serial number, make, model, year, value and three images to add a bike to the city’s online registry. Any recovered bikes are taken to a city bike-storage facility and cross-referenced with the registry to try finding their rightful owners.
A nondescript warehouse in a Winnipeg industrial district houses hundreds of bikes, likely bound for auction or the scrap pile. The city’s 2023 auction of recovered bikes ended Wednesday. Associated Auto Auctions, which conducted the weeklong online sale, had 428 bikes listed, an 11 per cent increase from 2022. All 428 were sold, the proceeds of which go into the city community services department’s coffers.
Winnipeg has a single bike-recovery officer who is responsible for the warehouse, recovering reported bikes, communicating with the police, providing promotional materials and returning bikes back to owners.
Bike Winnipeg executive director Mark Cohoe says only three per cent of 300 cyclists surveyed found the online registry useful for recovering their property.
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Before he retired last spring, Rob Brunt worked as the Vancouver Police Department’s first-ever bike detective.
He says in 2015, about one per cent of the 3,000 stolen bikes reported to the police were getting back to their owners. That year, he reached out to other cities and developed a partnership with Project 529, an online bike registration system.
“This system allows anybody to search the stolen database. The cops can use it, the bike stores can use it and the community can use it,” he says.
In the first year after Vancouver joined Project 529, police saw a 30 per cent decline in reported bike thefts, along with improvements in recovery efforts. That number is now a staggering 60 per cent, compared to the number of thefts in 2015.
It’s free for bike owners to register their rides with Project 529, and the international database is available to anyone, not just law-enforcement agencies.
Const. Kenny McKinnon of the Edmonton Police Service wanted to address Edmonton’s bike-theft crisis in a similar way.
“For The EPS, bike recovery was abysmal,” he says. “When we worked in the downtown core, frequently we would stop people on bikes, and it was well known that they were known bike thieves. But being able to prove that the bike was stolen was the most difficult thing that we ran into.”
McKinnon says it was important to partner with the community. Since 2019, all 18 bike shops in Edmonton offer point-of-sale registration for every sale, free of charge. EPS says more than 100,000 Edmonton bikes are registered through the Bike Index.
When the system was first implemented, 1,200 bikes were sent to auction or destroyed annually. In 2021, that number fell to 774.
Winnipeg’s online registry was developed by ePly, a company focused on event registration. The city is ePly’s first and only client for bike-registration purposes.
LeTourneau has unsuccessfully pitched Project 529 and the Bike Index to the city.
“(ePly) was never on our radar as a solution,” he says. “Why are we creating something that’s already been created elsewhere?”
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In April 2019, the community services department launched Bicycle Registry at the Time of Purchase Project, a stakeholder engagement survey. Of the 21 surveyed bike retailers who participated, 15 supported point-of-sale registration.
Tim Woodcock, owner of Woodcock Cycle Works, says the city approached him and other shops to register bikes at the point of sale. Through the shop’s own database, Woodcock keeps a record of serial numbers for every sale.
“It’s not that much extra work for us. I said to (the city) that I’m on board, and then we never heard anything back,” he says. “I don’t view selling a person a bike because their bike was stolen as a sale. If people get multiple bikes stolen, we lose them as cyclists.”
City spokesperson Adam Campbell says the city annually provides shops with promotional materials for registration that can be included in paperwork when someone buys a bike.
“During a consultation with stakeholders conducted in 2019, we found that not all bike shops or larger retailers support or have the resources to do a point-of-sale bike registration,” Campbell says.
WPS Sgt. Todd Martens says the registration system needs to change.
“If the system isn’t working to the best of its capability and you have evidence to prove it, let’s pivot,” he says.