{"id":354031,"date":"2021-10-12T18:55:31","date_gmt":"2021-10-12T15:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/meet-canadas-only-full-time-bike-theft-detective\/"},"modified":"2021-10-12T18:55:31","modified_gmt":"2021-10-12T15:55:31","slug":"meet-canadas-only-full-time-bike-theft-detective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/meet-canadas-only-full-time-bike-theft-detective\/","title":{"rendered":"#Meet Canada\u2019s only full-time bike theft detective"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Meet Canada\u2019s only full-time bike theft detective<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Vancouver has finally put a dent in its long-running bike theft epidemic. All it took was one dedicated officer.\n <\/div>\n
\n When Const. Rob Brunt first walked into the Vancouver Police Department\u2019s property room\u2014the sanctum where they store confiscated items\u2014the sight of the bicycles caught him off guard. A three-storey, motorized storage device built to hold 500 was full. Hundreds more were stored on the ground level.<\/p>\n

The room had become a de facto bike rack: police lacked resources to track down owners, said the civilian employee behind the desk, and few people bothered to report their bikes stolen. So the vast majority sat unclaimed for the 90 days before the police could send them to auction. \u201cI\u2019d throw them in the garbage if I got the chance,\u201d the attendant told Brunt.<\/p>\n

Brunt\u2019s mind flashed back to the 1,000 or so bicycles he figures he\u2019d seized from thieves in his 25 years as a street officer, and he wondered whether a single one had found its way back to its rightful owner. He app<\/a>roached Vancouver\u2019s police chief, Adam Palmer, about the issue, and the chief assigned the problem to Brunt. So begins the story of Canada\u2019s only full-time bike theft detective.<\/p>\n

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The son of British immigrants, Brunt has been an avid cyclist since he was a kid in Edmonton. He vividly recalls two neighbourhood kids stealing his bike when he was nine: \u201cYou\u2019d think I\u2019d been stabbed,\u201d he says. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have the income to replace it.\u201d He quickly enlisted the help of his two older brothers, who, in the time-honoured way of neighbourhood kids settling accounts, got the bike back.<\/p>\n

Brunt still reflects upon that memory, noting that the monetary value of a bicycle isn\u2019t indicative of its worth to the owner\u2014especially if they can\u2019t afford a new one.<\/p>\n

\"he<\/p>\n

The Vancouver Police Department\u2019s property room, where bikes must sit for 90 days before they can be sold at auction. (Photograph by Vishal Marapon)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When he was first tasked with tackling Vancouver\u2019s growing bike theft problem in 2014, he cast about for a solution already in use and was referred to a U.S. initiative, run by a former Microsoft employee, called Project 529. Brunt looked it up online and found a slick website and free app where cyclists anywhere in the world could register bicycles, upload photos of missing ones, see a GeoDASH map of where bikes had been stolen and view a list of stolen bikes in their area. Blown away, Brunt looked up the guy who started the project: J Allard. \u201cI\u2019m on Google at my desk and I say: \u2018Wait a minute. This isn\u2019t just any Microsoft guy. He\u2019s the inventor of the Xbox,\u2019 \u201d Brunt says.<\/p>\n

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Allard had recently left Microsoft, where he had also created a recreational cycling team called the 529 Legion. One night in 2011, before a planned trip<\/a> from Seattle to attend a mountain bike festival in Whistler, B.C., his own bike was stolen from the back of his truck\u2014despite being triple-locked in a garage with on-site security. \u201cThey took apart the bike rack to get it,\u201d Allard says in an interview. \u201cI felt pretty violated.\u201d<\/p>\n

He filed a perfunctory police report and, still fuming, went hunting. Within a month, he\u2019d tracked down his bike on eBay, on offer from a vendor he suspected of selling a range of stolen merchandise. Allard bought a laptop from the man and set about \u201cde-ghosting\u201d the hard drive to reveal the laptop had another, earlier owner. (\u201cI\u2019m pretty good at computers,\u201d he says matter-of-factly.) He now had evidence suggesting the eBay vendor was selling stolen goods. Police were able to arrest the suspect and recover Allard\u2019s bike.<\/p>\n

The odyssey made Allard realize how little was being done to combat bike theft, and he happened to be at a career crossroads. \u201cI thought, rather than building a billion-dollar company, why don\u2019t we dismantle one that shouldn\u2019t exist?\u201d he says. He founded Project 529 in December 2013, debuted a bike registration product called 529 Garage months later and was soon looking for a city to test his software.<\/p>\n

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Enter Brunt. In the spring of 2015, Allard and Brunt set up a meeting, and by the fall had launched a joint pilot project, centred in Vancouver but open to bike owners across North America.<\/p>\n

By the end of year one, 25,000 bikes had been registered; today, the number exceeds two million. And while it\u2019s tough to measure how many are from Canada\u2014the system requires only an email address\u2014Allard estimates that one-quarter come from north of the border.<\/p>\n

Signs are it\u2019s making a difference. When the initiative launched in October 2015, Vancouver had already reported approximately 2,800 bike thefts that year. By 2019, the number had dropped by 39 per cent. Brunt lists the cities from which recovered bikes were stolen\u2014Ottawa, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Portland, Seattle. For now, however, to the best of his knowledge, he remains the country\u2019s only bike detective. Two other officers\u2014one in Edmonton and another in Ottawa\u2014try to help but have other duties.<\/p>\n

Back in Vancouver, meanwhile, he\u2019s at least made inroads into the ground floor of the police property room, which is no longer overflowing with bicycles. \u201cIt\u2019s still pretty packed,\u201d Brunt hastens to add. \u201cWe have a long way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the November 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cBusting the crime cycle.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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