On your bike - an account of policing priorities

There is somethign very disturbing about knowing a stranger has been on your property while you were asleep.

It happened to me this week. Someone - or, more likely, a couple of someones - stole two bikes from my shed.

I was completely unaware of it happening at the time. It was all in the dead of night, as these things usually are, and I wasn't woken by the noise. That was the first surprising thing - sleeping with the window open, I'm regularly disturbed by passing groups of teens, drunks getting out of taxis and various motorised bikes using the street as a cut-through to a slightly less reputable housing estate nearby. But not that night.

The first I knew of the burglary was the discovery of pieces of the lock from the shed on the ground outside. Trying not to touch anything (I've watched enough detective shows to know all about preserving evidence), I took a quick glance in the shed and noticed the clear absence of the two large bikes which had been there the night before.

I got straight onto the police - being a journalist, I know the local force's non-emergency number off by heart, which I'm not sure is something I should boast about. The person who answered took down details of what had happened ("My shed has been broken into") and what was missing ("Two bikes"). She asked if anything had been left at the scene ("I haven't checked fully, but I couldn't see anything obvious") and if any of my neighbours had noticed anything ("It's 7am, I haven't been round to ask yet"). She then gave me a crime reference number and a phone number to call if any of my neighbours wanted to report anything - they could leave a message on an answerphone and the case details would be updated.

Then she hung up. Not abruptly, or mid-conversation, but she made it clear she had finished going through the checklist of questions and the call was over.

I carried on with my morning routine and it was only later, when I got to work, that I began to get a bit annoyed. There had been no opportunity for me to give any details of what had been taken in order for the police to have a better chance of finding it - no make, colour etc of the bikes, one of which had been modified quite significantly to make it very distinctive. Nor had they said anyone would be coming to check the property over and see if there was anything which might point them to the perpetrators.

I did wonder at this point if my expectations were too high. Police in Leeds must deal with hundreds of calls every day, so to them two missing bikes were probably not high on the list of priorities. I could quite happily accept that, as long as I felt my bikes were somewhere on the list. I asked one of the local PCSOs who happened to drop into the office that morning whether I was being naive about the process of reporting a crime. But his reaction was simple - in his division, anyone reporting a crime will receive a follow-up call to their home from a member of the neighbourhood policing team.

That evening, after almost an hour on hold, I finally got back through to the call centre and raised my concerns. It emerged the answerphone contact number I had been given was where I was expected to leave the additional details which hadn't been taken in my initial report. I pointed out how hard it would be for me to know this since nobody had told me, and the woman on the phone agreed. She also agreed I should have been told why the police would not be coming out to look at my shed and the narrow driveway, where the thieves had managed to squeeze past my car with the two bikes locked together. The reason, apparently, is that sheds are very difficult to fingerprint, and I had said I couldn't see any other evidence. I did, at this point, say how fortunate it was that I was a trained forensics expert who dealt with crime scenes every day of the week and was therefore able to give such a reliable account.

The end result was that two local PCSOs popped round the following evening for a chat. Coincidentally, they were the same two PCSOs whom I had spoken to a couple of months ago when a car in my street had had its window smashed during the night. They had attended that morning after a phone call from a passing dog-walker - the car owner had not even noticed the damage. So how can it be that, within the same force, there is such disparity in the way the same incident is dealt with? Or such a difference in the way two minor crimes are handled by the same officers? It would make an interesting - though time-consuming - article, looking at whether different teams within the same force treat similar incidents in similar ways.

Unfortunately, I'm now expecting to spend a lot of my free time shopping for a bike, a padlock and a security camera.