An MP who had her e-bike stolen in the centre of Oxford the “first time” she rode it into town has been told there’s a “CCTV blackspot”, despite filming surrounding cameras herself.
Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon since 2017, said her Black Pakyak E+ with a baby carrier on the back had been locked up with a Diamond lock and left for 40 minutes last Friday night. But when she returned from a trip to a nearby pub, the bike had gone from the railings where she had locked up her bike.
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Writing on Instagram, Moran wrote she had “already made a police report and hope Thames Valley Police can do their best. I know this happens a lot but I am so gutted.
But despite filming several CCTV cameras located in proximity to the bike racks, Moran later criticised the “CCTV blackspot” that police said that existed. A police spokesperson told the BBC that they were looking to move some cameras to “suitable locations” and that work was “ongoing” to transfer ownership of CCTV cameras to a partnership between police and local authorities.
Moran has been a long-term campaigner for better conditions for cyclists, speaking out in Parliament after the deaths of two cyclists in Oxfordshire in 2022. She subsequently arranged meetings with the relevant junior minister and Active Travel England.
In contrast, Thames Valley Police (TVP) do not have the best reputation when it comes to addressing the needs and concerns of cyclists. In February, the force were criticised after carrying out a one-hour operation where cyclists riding without lights were fined. Criticism centred on whether the operation was effectively targeting “the biggest risk to road safety in Oxford.”
In October 2024, the force in Windsor and Maidenhead also came in for criticism after naming an operation seizing illegal ‘e-bikes’ and scooters ‘Operation LYCRA‘. The Neighbourhood Policing Team said the mission’s aim, “was to stop and seize the use of privately owned E-Scooters and modified E-Bikes as well as cyclists contravening traffic signs on the one-way system on Eton High Street.”
However, the force was accused of stoking a culture war, and possibly infringing on copyright by naming its operation as such.
More broadly, the force were accused of “astonishing victim blaming” after criticising a council proposal to introduce more bike parking in the Oxford on the basis it would increase crime and “further burden” the police. Those comments were defended by the Thames Valley Police & Crime Commissioner.
The comments prompted the Oxfordshire Cycling Network to post, ““Do TVP want parking spaces removed to reduce car crime? Will TVP object to a shopping centre because it will bring more shoplifting? That new housing development will have burglaries, or burglars, so they should object. But they only object to bike stands.”
26 thoughts on “Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has new e-bike stolen “first time she took it to town”… then told there’s no CCTV available despite filming numerous cameras”
This isn’t a cycling story, but a police story and law and order story.
It doesn’t matter what you report these days, whether it’s a stolen bike, car, or even a burglary, the police aren’t interested and just give you a crime reference number for insurance. Excuses will follow if you provide them with evidence and insight.
This is an unfortunate side effect of living in a two-tier justice system, where wrong-speech is prosecuted with severe consequences (Lucy Connolly) but other crimes such as this are ignored due to misplaced priorities.
God I know. You can’t even urge people to set fire to hostels housing asylum seekers these days without fear of arrest. What is the world coming to?
@jackcycles – nope, ’tis nothing to do with a mythical “two-tier judicial system” and everything to do with 14 years of austerity leaving the nation’s institutions and infrastructure on life support. But keep blaming the Unicorns if you wish they’ll do nothing to help
@jaymack Nope – it really IS The Filth and their endless collection of Dodges designed to absolve themselves of responsibility for. Ms Moran MP will soon find that whenever any Dodge is proved to be fallacious, they have another instantly ready to deploy.
Bloody site! It removed: …responsibility for (insert offence here)
@wtjs – there’s a world of difference between incompetence/laziness which have been alive and well since Gilgamesh was a young lad which seems to be your beef (based on well founded person experience) and the utter tosh of asserting the existence of ‘two-tier-justice’. If two-tier justice does exist it is something that benefits the wealthy, the powerful and the influential.
@jackcycles There were 1.37 million prosecutions for criminal offences in the UK last year, with 16,000 of those being for hate crimes such as promoting violence against other races etc. So 1.2% of all prosecutions and you’re talking bollocks.
By the way the first time I had a bike stolen was in 1984 and way back then all the police did was give me a crime number for the insurance so whatever stops the police investigating bike theft it isn’t the amount of time they spend on, shock horror what’s the world coming to, people encouraging others to burn other human beings alive for having the temerity to ask for shelter.
Priceless.
@jaymack Although I haven’t used the term, there is indeed Two-Tier Policing throughout the UK. However it’s not, as is usually proposed, based specifically on race- it’s based on whether the offender, or the reporter, are people the police do or don’t like. The people they REALLY don’t like are people who report indisputable offences and include indisputable evidence. Of course, the people they don’t like COULD be various races, or women, or cyclists. There’s a reason that numerous officers from Charing Cross police station are simultaneously under investigation by IOPC
Agree with Jackcycles’ comment above – “This isn’t a cycling story, but a police story and law and order story.”
But a lot of the theft now is internationally mobile gangs who just fill up shipping containers full of bikes / power tools etc and have it on a boat within 24 hours of the theft. A lot of it is stolen to order or pre-sold before it even leaves the UK.
Meanwhile the police – apart from generally not giving a toss – are spending massive amounts of time policing protests …with forces all over the country sending officers to London every weekend.
Their radios don’t support internet / searching / connectivity to back office systems.
The back office systems are shit and new tech that’s proven to identify crime patterns and save massive amounts of admin time (like palantir) are blocked on a political whim.
And then even if the police catch someone, they have to fight the CPS to even get permission to charge and after that there will be a dork judge who hands out a non custodial sentence to someone even when they have nicked hundreds of £thousands of property and already have many previous convictions.
Between the police, CPS and judiciary the chance of detecting, prosecuting and punishing crime is next to zero.
@openroads – if you check the figures for number of incarcerations per 100,000 of population, England comes higher than any other Western European nation. This figures do not include Scotland and the North of Ireland. If you add those figures the UK jumps even further up the table. So there are plenty of prosecutions going on in the UK, more than in Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland, Sweden . . . . . . . . . .
So that would suggest there is plenty of prosecution going on the UK
That won’t be cheap to replace. Hope she had it insured.
@Rendel Harris “So 1.2% of all prosecutions and you’re talking bollocks.”
That’s the wrong kind of hate speech and they’ll see you down the station!
It is true though that some of our “defenders of free speech and the right to offend” can get … very offended by certain speech and have threatened to go to law.
And some public figures warning us of shady foreign types changing the country have a remarkable sympathy for a few dodgy foreign types who want to change the country – it just happens those are billionaires…
@jackcycles are you saying this doesn’t belong on road.cc as its not a (road) cycling story and they should remove it to openborders.conspira.c ?
@chrisonabike It’s been remarkable in the last 24 hours since the tragic death of Ann Widdecombe to see the number of people who are simultaneously approvingly quoting her phrase, “no one has the right to be protected from offence, insult or hurt feelings, it is an occupational hazard of life and if you don’t like it become a hermit” and simultaneously screaming about the “spiteful leftards who are celebrating her murder” (by saying they didn’t think she was a very nice woman, nearly all of them making such comments before it was disclosed that her death had become a murder investigation). There’s definitely two-tier moral judging over on the right!
@openroads
So what would you like to do, ban the democratic right to protest or allow all demonstrations and counter demonstrations to take place without any policing? Neither would seem a very desirable state of affairs.
There were 1.37 million criminal prosecutions in England and Wales last year, with 1.2 million convictions and 75,000 people sent to prison. Which doesn’t quite seem like “next to zero”, does it?
@Rendel Harris the “spiteful leftards who are celebrating her murder” by saying they didn’t think she was a very nice woman
Well, some of the evidence relating to these thoughts involves her deserting The Nasty Party for The Very Nasty Party- I suppose her supporters would give her credit for not flipping to The Extremely Nasty Party.
A police spokesperson told the BBC that they were looking to move some cameras to “suitable locations” and that work was “ongoing” to transfer ownership of CCTV cameras to a partnership between police and local authorities
We can safely assume that it will be ‘ongoing’ for a long time, and when they have exhausted that dodge they can move onto the sub-dodge where the members of anything called a ‘partnership’ blame the other members. Then they can move onto the BTP (British Traffic Police) Dodge where they ‘don’t have the time’ to look at all those videos when it obviously takes a police officer 4 hours to look at a 4 hour video of cycle-parking during which one or more bikes are stolen. It’s almost 2 years since TVP complained about the introduction of bike parking because it encourages the burdening of the police by all those un-investigateable bike thefts. What a tough life it is in the police!
Historic perspective: I seem to recall a police presence at the demos I attended back in the day *.
And I recall a lot of policing of public disorder also – around some football matches. (And even the odd industrial dispute – remember them, before it was doctors?)
And much effort went into dealing with the other big issue – “foreign terrorists” … from across the Irish sea.
Perhaps “protest” has changed in some ways though? Maybe there’s more “direct action” style protest? (But eg. Greenpeace have been doing this for ages…)
Maybe we’ve just become more shouty and bad-tempered? (Think this is the “people used to be better / nicer” fallacy).
Or… are we increasingly risk-adverse – and our rulers see political advantage in selectively preventing even more inconveniences ** (“protecting the vast majority from disruption”)?
Such policies also tend to be convenient for the “winners” and maintainers of the system as it happens…
* This was a very small sample though – I was more of an inactivist…
** Note that while increasing sentences and convictions for eg. disrupting traffic as “direct action” have certainly chilled that tactic…
… there’s much less focus on … er… preventing traffic disruption by addressing those policies which still push everyone to the decision to drive everywhere.
And little appetite to tackle those who then cause much more disruption by crashing. Or to prevent the inconvenience of actual death, injury and destruction that our implementation of mass motoring brings.
Can’t have been completely inactivist if you were attending some – laxtivist, perhaps?
I see the comment section has gotten worse again, first no editing, now no reply chains. What’s next, pay by the word?
@Rendel Harris “allow all demonstrations and counter demonstrations to take place without any policing?”
All? No. But most could get away fine with a dozen or so shaperones, the fact the Met deploy vast swarms in riot gear and call in extra support from across the country(and if you ever want to maintain your illusions about the police, stay out of any forums or groupchats involving said bussed-in coppers, the level of gleeful anticipation they display at the prospect of being able to engage in violent thuggery against “crusties” and “stop oil nonces” is legitimately depressing even to someone who already has a low opinion of the profession) so they can have 10 officers to arrest every sign-holding pensioner has nothing to do with necessity or public order and everything to do with the fact the modern British police are an entire workforce of little Cartmans demanding you Respect Their Authoritah. It’s a show of force intended to discourage protest in the first place.
At least, protest of certain kinds – funnily enough they never seem to need half the coppers in the country to police farmers or cabbies blocking up the roads, and their response to fascist marches and rallies seems to be downright proportional unless there’s a leftwing counter-protest planned…
@wtjs – sadly certain types of work tend to attract people with certain character traits. Some like the uniform and being able to boss people about, for others it’s about helping to make society a safer place for all. As a concerned citizen you should perhaps try your hand at law enforcement, they’re often on the lookout for Special Constables – https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2019/09/Special-Constables-Employee-Guide-September-2019-HMG-FV.pdf
There are reply chains on the main road.cc site – they haven’t worked on the offroad.cc and ebiketips subsites or the forum since the same ill-fated migration that killed the edit functionality.
@mdavidford “laxtivist”
Hmm… slacktivist? “I disapprove of what you say but I will sometimes defend ’till the next coffee and cake opportunity your right to say it”?
@mdavidford – bring back the edit function, at last something upon which we can all agree!