I joined vigilantes on the trail of my stolen £5,000 bike

Times

3 hours ago

It was Sunday afternoon when my phone alarm went off. My bike was being stolen from outside my Camden flat.
I had chained it up for just 20 minutes while I went upstairs to have a shower and change. By the time I got back it was gone.
The cargo bike was worth £5,000 when you include extras such as the child seat and we only bought it four months ago.
It's everything to us and has made our life much easier: getting to school is five minutes now versus half an hour on public transport.
Even though the bike had two top-of-the-range locks worth £400 and a £120 GPS device, the thief was able to get away.
In hot pursuit of the thief
As my phone warned the bike was on the move, I saw the thief cycling off in the distance and ran downstairs to go after him.
I chased him on foot but couldn't see where he had gone, so I got on a rented Lime e-bike and followed him. I was tracking the GPS on my phone.
The GPS tracker shows the bike was stolen at 1.18pm. I was almost catching up because the stolen bike had no battery.
My wife rang the police, who initially said they would only come if it was a life-and-death situation. It was only after I cycled off in pursuit that they called back and came, because some neighbours had seen the thief cutting the lock and rang 999.
My wife got in the police car and they followed on, but by then the thief was 20 minutes away. We missed the chance to intercept him, which is what this whole GPS kit is for.
The GPS device's app shows the thief took until 1.46pm to cycle to Queen's Park, Kilburn, in northwest London.
The investigation
When we arrived at the scene there was nobody there. We knocked on doors and talked to neighbours. It's a nice neighbourhood — I assumed when I was chasing that I would end up in an estate, but this is an expensive area where terraced homes sell for £900,000.
The police went to a few houses, checked through some gardens and spent 20 minutes trying to check the cameras, then they said: 'We need to wrap it up.'
I was hoping that the police would be able to get more CCTV because they have it everywhere now. But they were under time pressure — they had to go.
They gave us the report and a number to follow up, but that was about all they could do unless 'you see the ping go from the house to the street, then you can call 999 as it will be an active crime'.
Bringing in the 'vigilantes'
I thought 'Who takes someone's child's bike?' and posted my story on the London cycling sub-Reddit. A lot of people offered just to come down here, but I said it was probably not a good idea.
Someone suggested I call BackPedal, a bike security company that retrieves stolen bicycles. They sent out one of their top agents, Bilal, to help me.
He put a drone up to see if my bike was in one of the gardens, but we couldn't see it. Then he spoke to all the neighbours and even persuaded one to show us around the ground floor of his house to show the bike wasn't there.
Normally the company would install its own specialist tracking devices, which give it a much higher chance of recovering the bike. As I now know, retrieving a bike with off-the-shelf kit is more difficult.
For now it's a mystery where my bike ended up. Bilal Ali of BackPedal thinks the thief must have worked out how to remove the GPS device and chucked it over a wall.
What I've learnt
My mother was worried that my daughter and I would be targeted by muggers while we were actually on the bike. It's unfortunate that we have to even think about these situations with a nine-year-old on the back.
I'm checking all the secondary marketplaces such as Gumtree and Facebook constantly to see if anything pops up, but it's probably on its way to Romania by now.