A former BBC journalist has said it’s “a pain in the arse” that his bike was stolen and that the Metropolitan Police closed their investigation after 20 minutes, despite the bike being parked directly underneath CCTV cameras.
Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology correspondent at the corporation until 2021, locked his bike – “a £350 chunky hybrid” – at a sheltered rack on the edge of Haven Green, opposite Ealing Broadway tube station. However when he returned six hours later, the bike was stolen, with just the lock and helmet left on the ground.
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Signage at the bike racks directs users to the council website, where it states CCTV is “owned and operated by Ealing Council, in partnership with the Metropolitan Police.” As the bike storage is not part of the train station property, the crime could not be reported to the British Transport Police.
Cellan-Jones, who has Parkinson’s and was on his way to record his Movers and Shakers podcast in Holland Park, told road.cc “my walking’s not great at the moment so I jumped on the bike to speed me there.
“It’s actually chaos at the moment with so many Lime Bikes that have taken over but there’s a sheltered bike stand with a load of racks and some pretty obvious CCTV cameras. That’s where I left it.
“I went away for six hours, came back and found my bike was gone. The police response was pretty automated but you could tell there was a human somewhere in the system.”
That response, which Cellan-Jones detailed on Substack, was that the investigation would be closed “barely 20 minutes” after the crime was reported, as the 6 hour timeframe for investigating CCTV is “not suitable for investigation. If you are able to view the footage and pin point an exact time the offence occurred, we can look to reopen the investigation.” However, that process would have required more than £250 in fees to the council and the use of a solicitor or insurance company to obtain the footage.
“With my journalistic hat on, I wanted to prod this and see how far it goes. The main point for me is overclaiming that something is under surveillance. There’s no point being under surveillance if you’re not going to do anything about it. You lure people into a false sense [of security].”
It is not the only time in recent years that the police have been criticised for their attitude to bike theft. In October, the British Transport Police announced they would only investigate stolen bikes that were left unattended by their owner for less than two hours. After much criticism, that policy was scrapped in January.
In February, the London Cycling Campaign branded the situation an “epidemic” and claimed that only two percent of stolen bikes in the capital are recovered.
It’s also not the first time Cellan-Jones has experienced such misfortune, having had a bike stolen four years ago, albeit when it was locked against a lamp post with a “not very high quality chain”. But his experience with the CCTV-covered rack has left him more inclined to avoid it in the future.
“I would’ve been better off tying it to a lamppost where somebody crouching down with an angle-grinder would’ve been more out in the open than somebody in a mass of bikes. I think it was actually less safe.”
Despite the theft, Cellan-Jones has not been put off cycling and has already made plans to get a replacement.
“I’ve used the bike a lot more lately for short distances. I’m not much of a cyclist but it’s just for convenience. You don’t want to get a car just to go into Ealing. I play walking football and it’s just a five-minute ride there instead of a 25-minute walk.”
“To be frank it’s just the bloody annoyance of it. The inconvenience, it’s just a pain in the arse! There’s nothing that can beat an angle-grinder, unless there’s this monstrous chain that costs £110… I’m not gonna do that!”
19 thoughts on ““Just a bloody annoyance”: Ex-BBC journalist told Met Police won’t investigate his stolen bike, despite deliberately parking under a CCTV camera”
I had my saddle stolen from my bike when locked at a train station.
It was locked directly under CCTV as in this case.
Reported to the police who said they could see it in the footage.
No further update after that despite me chasing.
You’ve got his name wrong several times in the article.
It should, of course, be RoryCellan-Jones.com
Ah, I miss having Eddie Mair on PM!
A CCTV camera does not mean much. Outside work there is a large bicycle rack and people’s bikes were being stolen so they installed 4 fake CCTV cameras.
Have Plod not heard of the fast forward button? Wonderful invention.
Or even better, as often recommended on here, binary search: if you’ve got a four hour recording, go to two hours in, if the bike’s still there go to three hours, if not go to one hour in. Already in a matter of seconds you’ve found the hour window when the bike was stolen, then just apply the same method, start on the half hour in that hour…a halfway competent person will find the recording of it being stolen within a couple of minutes.
Or alternatively Binary search AFTER motion detection.
(Note that its almost certainly H264 video, so macroblock motion is part of the video encoding, so most of the work is already done)
Preferably use a suitable tool to select the area the bike is in and ignore all footage where that area doesn’t change (can apply a threshold), then do binary search on whats left. (though you can just do binary search ignoring footage with no motion in the entire video area).
Wouldn’t suprise me if 4 hours footage only actually has 20-30min of motion…
(Wouldn’t suprise me if the CCTV software already has features to remove stationary footage for lossy compression; And even with moving cameras, you can just filter for footage with inconsistent motion vectors – if every macroblock is moving in the same way thats camera swivel…)
Issue really is £250 in admin and court fees for something that should be being done for free (already paid in tax). I’d suggest a freedom of information request for the cctv
The coppers are busy with online hate crime, comfortably seated in front of ascreen with a cuppa and scones. When they feel the need for physical activity, they join LBGTQIA+++ parades.
For 2025-26, the Met budget amounts to £3.5 billion, representing a £320 million increasee against the previous year. Where all that money goes?
Yes, we certainly wouldn’t want the police investigating men who stalk women online, men who make threats of rape and violence against women and children, terrorists and criminal gangs using the Internet to plan their crimes, people responsible for racial and religious hate attacks and so on, would we? It really is time you pissed off back to the Daily Mail where you belong.
Don’t they have a point about the bureaucracy-over-effective-action of the modern police force though?
At least things got done when the local copper was regularly out on the beat, knew everyone and could sort out stuff like bike thefts – with a word to the parents and a clip round the ear. (Or a “suspect must have repeatedly trapped their undercarriage in a desk drawer before falling down the stairs” for the hardened or funny-looking crim).
And we rarely heard of complaints (mostly because there was no paperwork to trip them up).
There are points to be made regarding that issue but claiming that the reason other crimes aren’t being dealt with is that the police are looking for online hate crime is stupid (OP not you) for two reasons, firstly because despite what GB News and others might claim it’s only a very small minority of offices who are dealing with this area and secondly because online hate crime, as I mentioned above, covers a huge range of offences, many of them very serious such as stalking, witness intimidation, credible threats of harm and credible threats to life and so on. Many people seem to think that because it’s on the Internet and you can just whack a quick threat out on your telephone it’s not serious; imagine back in the day if someone was sending threatening letters to their victim saying they were going to be raped, tortured or murdered, that would be taken very seriously but nowadays if it’s done on Twitter people say it’s a waste of police time to chase it up. As for the statement “When they feel the need for physical activity, they join LBGTQIA+++ parades”, I think that tells us all we need to know about this particular poster. Funny they chose that particular example rather than policing football matches or facilitating Remembrance Day parades, isn’t it?
T’was my attempt at silliness – perhaps I should just have let them continue to illustrate their own biases.
OTOH improvements do come at some cost. The law is a growth (in complexity) industry. Like health – as we do “more better” while some measures can be cost-saving overall it’s all got to be paid for (mostly on the staff and their training).
But almost all of that sort of investigation is “back office”.
The street level policing resources are at an all time record high in terms of warranted officers (or at least were at the time of the last election) so there’s no excuse for a beat level constable / safer neighbourhoods team not having 10 minutes to view the cctv footage in Ealing Council’s offices.
The council offices are only a 5 minute walk from where the bike was stolen and also directly opposite the main police station for Ealing. The beat level officers / safer neighbourhood team would have to walk past Ealing Council at least twice a day going to and from work.
This is yet more excuses about why they can’t investigate a theft from a location where literally hundreds of bikes have been stolen / partially stolen in the period since they installed the CCTV cameras.
I also think the potential cost angle / fee to view is an outright lie given the council own the video and the cameras were jointly funded by the police and the council.
Perhaps Ealing Council could be encouraged to look at their own CCTV footage and share the relevant details with the police? There seems a fair chance a quick review would generate a familiar face.
If they aren’t willing to do this when an offence has occurred, then perhaps an FOI on how much they spend on CCTV they don’t use – the local press might be interested to know.
Wow I wonder what they were thinking of when they came up with the idea for that cycle parking design.
“Everywhere I look, something reminds me of her”
“To be frank it’s just the bloody annoyance of it. The inconvenience, it’s just a pain in the arse! There’s nothing that can beat an angle-grinder, unless there’s this monstrous chain that costs £110… I’m not gonna do that!”
It’s a sorry state of affairs that it is necessary, but, unfortunately, I would suggest that investing in an angle-grinder-resistant lock would be money well spent. Various options exist, although £110 is optimistic – I think they start at around £150 and several are in the £200-£300 mark. It’s a lot of money to spend on a lock, but cheaper than a new bike, and saves the inconvenience too.
Yes, they are not completely invulnerable, and parts can still be stolen off your bike, but most thieves will simply choose an easier target. Despite spending far too long on cycling sites/forums like this one, I’m yet to hear of an incident in which a bike was stolen by a thief cutting through a dedicated angle-grinder-resistant lock.
I found a stolen ebike dumped near my house. Police told me to just hang onto it, but won’t even investigate that.