Exact figures are not known, but innocent buyers of second-hand bikes are riding around right now on stolen property...if not the whole bike than certainly some of its parts, according to the Police.

“I will guarantee that there are people right now in Bermuda riding stolen vehicles and they don't realise it,” said Sgt. Terence Maxwell, who heads up the Vehicle Crime Unit.

“Possibly the entire bike is stolen, no doubt about it, whether it is from one bike or a number of bikes. I guarantee there are innocent people riding stolen vehicles or vehicles that have stolen parts on them.

“That's because when doing routine checks we find so many bikes with stolen parts on them. This is why I advocate anybody coming to see us and getting their bikes U-marked.”

The U-marking of cycles is a free service provided by the Police that takes only a few minutes, but not enough members of the public take advantage of it. Thieves go to great lengths to stay one step ahead of the Police, including the decades old practice of erasing serial numbers on engines and frames.

“We have the ability to raise U-marks that have been erased,” Sgt. Maxwell warned.

“We can also raise engine and frame numbers that have been erased, via some special gear that we have. A lot of it has been ground down and we still raise the original numbers. We find people who try to erase U-marks.”

As Sgt. Maxwell revealed last week, the Vehicle Crime Unit deals with hundreds of bike thefts every year, which is costly to both the owners and the insurance companies. To assist those to purchase a bike which is free of stolen parts, the Unit will check second-hand bikes for the purchaser.

“Anybody who is considering buying a second-hand bike, before you lay out good money for that vehicle, come and see us with the vehicle,” he urged.

“Take it for a test ride and bring it to us to check it for you. We will check to see if any part of that vehicle has been stolen. We'll check the engine and frame number to see if anything has been altered, we'll look U-marks to see if it has been tampered with in any way and we will advise you accordingly if anything has been stolen on that bike.

“If anything has been stolen, obviously we are going to impound that bike right away, but it will save you being arrested as an innocent party.”

He said the Police have a low tolerance for cycle theft, a crime that is being committed mostly by young boys, some as young as 12 or 13. And it is the older teens, some unknowingly, who are ending up with stolen parts on their bikes.

“We have arrested a number of people throughout the years who are completely innocent.

“They bought a bike on good faith, but we stopped them on a routine road check and have done a full check of the vehicle and found stolen parts on it.

“That person, more often than not, is devastated, but if they bought it in good faith they are not liable. The problem is they take a hit because we're not going to give them back stolen property, we're going to take it off their bike, and if it's an engine we're going to let you take the frame and wheels but you can't take the engine so you're back to square one.”

“If we find you riding a bike with stolen parts on it, as much as you protest your innocence, you are going to be arrested and detained until such time as we can check your story. We're going to call your parents, or anybody, to find out if the bike was bought in good faith.

“If we find you bought it on good faith you will get our apologies and we will send you on your way, however we will send you on your way on foot because we will be taking parts off that bike!”

The police have files on those convicted of cycle thefts and they know the repeat offenders.

“We keep comprehensive records of all our cycle thieves. We (the Vehicle Crime Unit) have our own fingerprint and photograph database of the well known cycle thieves, and if we see one of the well known cycle thieves on a vehicle, we are bound to stop him if we have suspicions about his activities.

“We make no apologies whatsoever, I'm trying to do my job to the best of my ability. A lot of the criminals we deal with are youths, there's no doubt about that, between the ages of 12 and 22. That's our problem area.”

Despite so many people being affected by cycle theft, from the 50-year-old grandmother to the 16-year-old enjoying her first bike, Sgt. Maxwell said the public could do more to help the Police stamp out the crime.

“That includes anybody in a neighbourhood who has suspicions about people, who sees lots of traffic in any particular person's house, we are always, always interested.

“We will treat it with the utmost confidence. I'll be honest, quite a lot of the 33 percent recovery rate is self generated. We don't get an overwhelming amount of help from the public, we get a lot of people calling to say their bike has been stolen or they found a bike on their property of found one when they were on a walk that they suspect is stolen.

“The problem is at least 90 percent of those are vehicles that have been abandoned, which is a huge problem in problem. A person's bike has broken down and they leave it for a long, long time before they recover it and of course things get stolen off it.

“You cannot go to the dump and take parts off any bike that's there and put it on your bike or vehicle. Even if it's legitimately dumped, if it is found in your possession that is stealing and you will be prosecuted for it.”

John Moore is the Impound Officer at Prospect, where stolen bikes are taken. But even after their owners have been contacted, oftentimes they don't collect their bikes and they eventually have to be dumped.

“That's a big problem we have, trying to get people to come in and collect their bikes,” he said. “I can contact people who say ‘I'll come and collect it' and end up contacting them half a dozen times. That's a big part of my day, calling people and telling them it's going to go to the dump if they don't collect it.”

He admits some of the stolen bikes in the yard have stolen parts on them, as do some bikes involved in accidents.

Sgt. Maxwell credits his ten-man department for “working very hard under very trying circumstances”.

“We are bringing the numbers down, our prosecutions for thefts are going up and I think we're winning the war,” said the Unit head. “We are starting to recover significantly more stolen vehicles. We've got some very exciting new technology available to us and we're hoping to employ some new technologies this year.”

Sgt. Maxwell also had hopes of sending some officers from his department to courses overseas in America and Britain.

Cycle theft of this magnitude is probably unique to Bermuda, where there are about 30,000 bikes.

Another type of vehicle theft that has been on the rise lately is car theft, but fortunately that will never reach the same proportions.

Even so there were 18 car thefts reported in the last quarter of 2001.

“It's not a huge problem because, obviously, there is nowhere to go with a car and it's very hard to strip it down to its component parts and fix it to a new car,” said Sgt. Maxwell.

“It's not like a bike that you can strip in 15 minutes and carry the parts yourself, so a lot of the vehicles (cars) stolen are taken for joy riding and transportation purposes to get to and from somewhere.

“It does come under my department but it is nowhere the same sort of crime as cycle theft.”

Friday: The cost to the insurance companies.