In more innocent times, I’d have responded to the news that police wished to fit tracking devices to electric bicycles with a grunt of approval.
Finally, I’d have thought. Plod has come up with a practical, apparently technologically literate yet relatively inexpensive method to fight low-level crime. Makes a change from the rainbow helmets. Why stop at e-bikes? Track all the cars, too.
These days, however, I cannot help but view such measures with cynicism. But let me first explain. Sarah Kennedy, the chief constable of Merseyside police, has said that policing risked being ‘behind the curve’ because muggers are using e-bikes to carry out their assaults. Scousers were stealing them, she said, in order to rob people and speed away.
Do you really want the police tracking your motor when a mere pootle to an isolated park could land you with a fine, or even imprisonment?
‘[E-bikes] cost £2,500,’ she told the Police Superintendents’ Association conference in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire. ‘Think about the cost of an Apple trackable device, and yet we have no way of tracking the bikes. We’re behind the curve.’
Now, I’ve never had an e-bike and I hope I never will, at least until I’m in my nineties and no longer have the strength to ride a normal one. But the experience of having a bicycle stolen is one to which I can relate. A couple of years ago, my daughter left her new mountain bike outside the house for a couple of minutes – idiotically unlocked – and returned to find it gone. I reported it to the police but they might as well have laughed at me down the phone. There was no way they were going to do anything.
In central London, it’s even worse. When I used to work for the Mail, I once rode in on my dark green, Scott gravel bike and locked it, both with a D-lock and a chain, on High Street Kensington. When I returned at the end of the day, the chain had been sliced through. The brazenness of doing this on such a busy road! Apparently, this is what they do: they drive up on a moped, use an angle grinder to slice off the lock and chuck it into a waiting van before buzzing off. The whole thing can take just minutes. Thankfully, when I returned to my bike, the thieves had apparently been interrupted before they could apply the angle grinder to the D-lock.
So the instinct to clamp down on crime is an entirely proper one. Yet the notion of fitting tracking devices is where I start to get jumpy. The first reason, I’m afraid, is Covid. That awful chapter in the history of our islands was characterised by policies that were profoundly illiberal and should never have been implemented, all enforced by police with a little too much enthusiasm.
Members of the public was given no opportunity to assess the level of risk they were facing themselves, and to act accordingly. People were questioned by the police for attending exercise classes, travelling from one village to the next and walking their dogs, regardless of whether it put anybody else in danger.
Remember the drones used by Derbyshire police to ‘shame’ hikers who simply wanted to walk in the Peak District? Remember the fear associated with even sitting for a little while on a bench?
Now imagine that you live in a future in which a pandemic comes again – only now vehicles are being tracked. Once again, the police decide to enforce sledgehammer restrictions that seriously impede on civil liberties. This time, however, new restrictions on your movements have become much easier to enforce. Do you really want them tracking your motor when a mere pootle to an isolated park could land you with a fine, or even imprisonment?
That’s not to mention the murder of Sarah Everard and the rape of other women at the hands of serving police officers. I cannot be alone in feeling nervous about allowing these sorts of cops to track the movements of members of the public, especially women.
Recent years have shown that the police cannot be trusted not to use the tools of crimefighting for the purposes of repressing our freedoms, or worse. Protecting the public is paramount; if the safety of our e-bikes is the price we must pay, so be it.
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