Personal property theft up in Vancouver, and you can help prevent it
Posted September 23, 2014 12:14 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Vancouver Police say you need to take more responsibility when it comes to safeguarding your personal property.
While they say most crime is generally down over the past few years, opportunistic property crime is up. The target is anyone who’s ever set a purse or cell phone down in a bar, a coffee shop or a library.
Deputy Chief Constable Adam Palmer says letting your guard down makes you vulnerable. “It’s day-to-day Vancouverites… it could be any of us. I think we’re all guilty of it sometimes.”
“You sit down and you get that sense of safety in the city and a little bit of complacency. Maybe you don’t want to lose your seat, so you leave your laptop sitting there as you go and get a refill on your coffee. Meantime, someone walks by and pockets whatever’s on the table. Anything sticking out of a purse, small tablets, laptops — those types of items.”
The VPD is launching a new awareness campaign to remind you to keep an eye on your property. Palmer says it gives them more bang for their buck than spending time and money on targeted enforcement.
The campaign will focus on those social hubs, including bars and the city’s cruise ship terminal.
Palmer tells us tourists aren’t being singled out “We try to target locations where we have a high volume of people coming through and the cruise ship terminal is a logical location.”
He says bike theft is also up but people don’t realize how many are recovered.
Around 1,800 bikes have been stolen so far this year, but the VPD has also recovered about 1,000. The problem is that they’ve only been able to return around 10 per cent of those bikes because there is no way to identify the owner.
“There’s just no way of identifying you without that drivers’ licence [number] or serial number,” explains Constable Rob Brunt with the VPD’s Bike Unit.
“If you put your drivers’ licence on it, when I run it through the police computer, I’ll give you a quick call and then boom, I got your bike back.”
The new campaign will also encourage people to record their bike’s serial number when they buy it so you can then make a police report if it’s stolen.
“So then if your bike is stolen, report it to us. Because, as you can see, this is a vast amount of bikes we recover,” says Brunt, pointing to the estimated 600 bikes being housed inside the VPD’s stolen property warehouse.
