A transport minister has tried to quash the story that British Transport Police (BTP) will not investigate bike thefts outside stations where the bicycle has been left for more than two hours.
BTP have themselves tried a few times to counter the story, which appears to have first appeared in a report earlier this month from the BBC’s Tom Edwards.
Critics say the BTP policy means those facilities are not secure and theft has effectively been decriminalised.
The BTP said: “The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV… the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm.”
The problem with the story is that even though the online version had a shot of a document headed “Volume Crime Assessment Factors” that referred to “if the cycle has been left outside the location for over 2 hours”, it wasn’t clear whether this was fully determinative, or, as the word suggests, a factor to be taken into account.
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