Bike Theft Statistics

Every now and then I'll hear from someone looking for bike theft statistics. Just this week I had a conversation with a journalist looking for theft statistics by city, and it brought me back to hunting down some hard-to-find numbers. I thought I'd wrap up some of the major issues in one post.

Long story short: It's real hard to get statistics on bike theft.

First, the problem is so common that few people who get their bikes stolen bother reporting it. So right off the bat, data's missing.

Second, the statistics that do come in are all over the place - a bike lock study here, a college campus report there, or a 'general crime trends' study. There are often many disparate sources, often focusing on different aspects of the problem.

Third, when there are crime reports that include bike theft (see below) the numbers are often lumped under such broad categories - larceny, petty theft, property theft - and this makes deducing any finer-grained trends difficult.

There are a couple of sources worth highlighting:

1) Just this week an article popped up ok UK bike theft stats - it quotes the Home Office as saying 480,000 bikes stolen in 2006-07.

2) Every year the FBI puts out a "Uniform Crime Report" which reports overall crime trends and statistics for the US. Bike theft is lumped under Property Crime / Larceny-Theft. Their numbers do break the problem down by region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West) but lumps bike theft into a percentage of total larceny reported. For the record, their data says 231,238 bikes were stolen in 2006, down a bit from 248,792 in 2005.

3) Kryptonite, the lock makers, put out a yearly "Top ten worst bike theft cities" list as a press release. (For some reason this release isn't anywhere on the Kryptonite site, but one of their employees has blogged about the recent one here)

Know of any other bike theft resources out there? Let me know.