Where do stolen bikes go?
I had a £2,000 electric bike stolen in Oxford. No worries - it had a GPS tracker, and I could see it heading to Birmingham up the M40. Also, my neighbour had CCTV footage. You couldn&#x27;t make out the faces or number-plate, but you could see it was a black Mercedes. It was taken at about 3AM.<p>So they had &quot;liberated&quot; the bike (it was locked up), and immediately headed out of town. I&#x27;m sure it was scouted, then they came back in the small hours to steal it. I&#x27;m convinced that it was an organized operation, and the bike might have been stolen to order.<p>When it stopped moving, I could see it was located in the back of a house in a Birmingham suburb. So I rang the Oxford police.<p>They weren&#x27;t interested - they told me to contact West Midlands police. So I rang them. No, they were not going to investigate: &quot;Don&#x27;t you realize how many Porsches are stolen in this city every day?&quot; Also, they said they can&#x27;t just walk in and have a look around (I guess they need a warrant, which is fair enough; but then why not get a warrant?)<p>Like, I knew the address it was located at; so maybe the WM police would provide an officer to protect me, when I head up to Brum to collect the machine? No way.<p>So I gave up. My replacement has no GPS tracker.<p>So my experience seems to differ from the Amsterdam narrative. I had heard that most stolen bikes end up in Birmingham. My anecdote appears to confirm that bikes stolen in Oxford don&#x27;t stay in Oxford.