Earlier this year, the UK government revealed plans for its Crime and Policing Bill, potentially paving the way for technology to effectively fight bike crime through tracker and geolocation tech.
The Bill, now making its way through Parliament and beginning its journey to become law, contains a measure pertinent to the persistent blight of bike crime. Namely, giving police power to act on data from tracking devices, allowing them to search properties where stolen items have been electronically geolocated.
This is potentially a gamechanging point – until now, police had to have a warrant in addition to electronic geolocation data pinpointing a stolen phone – or bike – which in practice seldom happened, anecdotal reports indicate. That heavily undermined the effectiveness of bike trackers, whether fitted during the production process or via aftermarket trackers sold separately.
With this point set to change, there’s considerable potential for bike trackers to become a genuine obstacle to crime, effectively enabling law enforcers to use bike tracker data. At this point we stress the law has not yet come into force and has to jump through legislative hoops in Parliament before it become enshrined.
If passed, the Bill will create a new targeted power for the police to enter premises to search for and seize electronically tracked stolen goods, ranging from mobile phones to stolen vehicles and agricultural machinery.
The government said: “Under the new warrantless powers of entry, officers will be able to enter premises identified by electronic mapping if stolen items are believed to be there […]
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