That bike sitting outside a lecture hall might be under surveillance from outer space, as part of a high-tech sting. Sound paranoid? U of T campus police hope so.
Police Services are hoping their eight-month-old “Bait Bike” sting operation will deter criminals in an area plagued by bike thefts.
“A lot of students, they can’t afford a new $200-$300 bike. Once they lose that one, it’s done, and they’ve lost their mobility,” corporal Peter Franchi, the coordinator of Bait Bike, told the University Affairs Board in a May 1 presentation on the project.
Franchi noted that the program benefited from “very inexpensive” media coverage that boosted the deterrent factor at no cost to the university. When the operation launched last September, national news agencies reported that it had netted four arrests in a single day. In other words, four different bike thieves took the Bait Bike, and were caught.
Franchi said the arrests themselves would have also decreased the number of bike thefts, since a single culprit often commits multiple thefts.
Bait Bike takes the lead from a similar police operation in Victoria, B.C. For their bike stings, U of T police hide a GPS beacon on a high-end bike, which they leave in high bike-theft locations. Using cell phone towers and satellites, police track the position and speed of the bike on a computer, or even a Blackberry PDA. When someone steals the bike, police home in on it and arrest the would-be thief.
In the year since the program launched, reported bike thefts on-campus dropped slightly to 82, down from 97 thefts in the previous year. When a UAB member asked whether the drops in bike thefts since 2004 (when 168 bikes where stolen) could be caused by fewer people reporting their bikes being stolen, Franchi said that increased patrols and arrests were likely factors.
Provided with the GPS beacon and free live tracking in the interim by Nero Global Tracking, Franchi hopes the program will continue indefinitely, with campus police adding more Bait Bikes to their ranks after the current one-year evaluation period. However, Nero has provided its technology with “no real time limit,” Franchi said.
Students might balk at the $1,400 cost of the GPS beacon (and live tracking costs extra airtime fees), but Franchi says that in 3-5 years, the technology will likely be smaller and cheaper.
In the meantime, warning stickers with messages such as “This could be a Bait Bike…Do you really want to take that chance?” available starting July for students and faculty to affix to their bikes, will have to do.
