Read on Twitter
Ok, so a thread on why The Mets response to cycle theft is so poor. So, your bike gets nicked, you report it, no CCTV, case closed. But the next day the bike appears on Gumtree/eBay so you tell Police who swing into action right? Well, not quite... https://twitter.com/gmhales/status/1326085994639187968
The seller has an email and mobile number and we know the bike will prob sell quickly being at a 5 finger discount. The report you made originally gets reported online, these take on average 2 days to get allocated to an PC to investigate due to huge backlog and understaffing.
That officer is also on a response team, so has many other pressing jobs, often involving violence, they are likely to have less than 2 years service as well. If you are lucky, they read the report on the day its allocated, if you are unlucky you are looking at another 24hrs.
So three days in, the officer looks at the report, now the easiest thing to do would be to call the seller, arrange a meet and nick them. Except pretending to be a member of the public would mean they were acting as an undercover officer which is tightly regulated under RIPA.
In short, that PC cannot do that. They need to get a UC operation authorised to do it. It isn't rocket science, but it isn't straightforward either. The sgts on the team are mostly acting up, and have never done one before and the probationer doesn't know how. CID won't help.
If the unit you want to help you aren't in, or you are going on to nights you are screwed and you can't hand jobs on to other teams because everyone's workloads are crippling. If you are lucky, you might get the UCO authorised, but if you do, you then need to resource it.
You have a buy arranged, but can you guarentee that on that date and time you have enough PCs to safely run it, let alone that it should have been put on crimint, risk assessed and everything else. Your team is for the whole borough, one medium sized incident and the Op is off.
So now 5 days in the victim says they are going to do it themselves and call Police if needed. Good idea? You can't advise them to do this because it is so risky, what if they get stabbed? You try and talk them out of it but no idea if you will get through.
Oh, I forgot on day 3 the probbie tried to complete an Optica request to get the details of who owns that ebay account, but it's a friday and no one is answering. You aren't getting a reply anytime soon. So there you are, stuck with no real way to move forward.
It gets dealt with slow time, you get the sellers name, do some intel, but think they might have a lockup, so you need a warrant. Again, probbie with a huge workfile on crap shift pattern trying to get a warrant? Another 2 weeks maybe? Bike is gone. Victim disinterested.
Probbie now looking at whether they can get any digital evidence off suspects phone to prove a HSG? Phone is locked, chances of getting it unlocked for a low level HSG with no property recovered? Zero. Case closed. Everyone unhappy. The end.
Forgot to add that contrary to popular belief we also can't do our own research on facebook/ebay etc willy nilly. There are regulations against regular PCs jumping into people's personal accounts, even if public. So, that also makes life difficult. Joy.
