Press Release - Shock news on Derbyshire Police Bike Theft Ranking while Thames Valley Police contradict themselves
Derbyshire Police have contacted MAG to apologise for an administrative error that resulted in bike theft stats being quoted incorrectly. The revised figures see Derbyshire tumble in the rankings from 1st to 25th. Meanwhile Thames Valley Police has revealed data that allows MAG to rank them 29th.
Derbyshire Police's Freedom of Information Officer explained in a letter to MAG's central office that: "As a consequence of further searches by our analysts it has been established that the original figures as supplied are wrong and, therefore, should be disregarded. The revised figures are:
2017 - 437
2018 – 414
This revelation strips Derbyshire of its top rank in the Bike Theft Rankings, with the new figures revealing a theft rate of 1 in 62 bikes stolen as opposed to the originally published 1 in 776. Meanwhile, despite communications from Thames Valley Police to MAG stating an inability to provide the data within the constraints of the FOI legislation, a separate FOI request to TVP from MAG Regional Rep, Tim Peregrine, brought a confused and contradictory response. The response that Tim received contained a letter stating:
"Please note however that the vehicle type is selected by the officer dealing with the report and may not be a completely accurate reflection of the vehicle type". The figures provided in an attached document were inconveniently broken down by financial year as opposed to calendar year.
The figures were thus presented as "for the date range 01/01/2017 – 31/12/2018 broken down by financial year". The quoted figures are were:
2016/17: 244
2017/18: 1053
2018/19: 734
MAG has therefore taken the total figure across two years to be 2031, and averaged that to 1015.5 per year. This places Thames Valley Police at 29th in the rankings.
When asked to comment, MAG's Director of Campaigns & Political Engagement, Colin Brown, who has been responsible for collating the ranking data said "it's probably best that I don't."
The new data has now been published in a revised document which can be found at:
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