North Yorkshire Motorcycle Theft Stats
At Leeds and Bradford MAG we’ve been tracking motorbike thefts for several years. We’re currently investigating how to improve the low prosecution rate in Leeds and Bradford. Because there isn’t a formal MAG group for North Yorkshire we thought we’d find out what the situation is there. To do this we sent a Freedom of Information Act request to North Yorkshire Police. Our first request was refused because they said it would take too long. We put another request in asking for less-detailed information and got a response last week. It can be found at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/motorcycle_theft_stats#incoming-1629005. we asked for statistics between January 2015 and June 2020 so we could compare year-on-year changes.
The main points are as follows:
- Between January 2015 and June 2020 there were 1290 thefts in North Yorkshire
- During the same time 395 bikes were recovered. This is a recovery rate of 31%
- The number of thefts fluctuated but was generally around 250 a year
- A total of 102 cases resulted in prosecution. This is a prosecution rate of 8%
- Of the 6 police divisions, the ones with the highest number of thefts fluctuate between York and Scarborough & Ryedale
Attached to this post are some graphs showing the number of thefts by year, by area, and what happened each month. It takes time to bring a case to trial so prosecutions in a certain month aren’t the same as thefts.
North Yorkshire is the largest county in the UK. In the absence of a formal MAG group we’ll continue to monitor the situation and campaign to improve the prosecution rate. We’d like to get a group up and running so join the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/NorthYorkshireMAG/) if you’re interested. If you’re not a member of MAG you can join at https://www.mag-uk.org/.
