Hugh and his special stolen Specialized

This month I have a particularly good news story coming out of Southbank Police Station. The story starts back on August 30, 2019, when Hugh’s collectible Specialized S-Works M4 Festina edition bicycle was stolen from the Royal Melbourne Hospital car park where it was chained up.   Holding little hope that his bike could be recovered and not wanting to waste police time, Hugh decided to not report the theft to police, but made a post on Facebook, where he was referred by friends to report his theft to BikeVAULT. Unbeknown to Hugh, his bike was recovered by Southbank Police three weeks later, when police attended an address in Southbank and arrested a 58-year-old male in relation to the theft of another bike. While at the address police recovered the bike they were looking for and Hugh’s bike, which was confiscated as suspected stolen property, as it could not be found on the police database and the investigating police were unaware of BikeVAULT at the time. Fast forward to December 2020, when Acting Sergeant Simon Pitzen, who has a keen interest in bikes and regularly searches BikeVAULT, spotted Hugh’s bike in the property store. After performing a simple “Make” and “Model” search of stolen listings on BikeVAULT, he was able to quickly find the stolen listing and identify Hugh.  While Hugh’s bike had a court order to be sold, quick work by the diligent Sergeant saw the bike released from the property store in a matter of days and returned to Hugh, who was very happy to get his much-loved bike back. Great work by all involved! Why it is important to report all bike thefts to the police While the recovery and return of stolen bikes to their owners is less than 10 per cent in Australia, the police do recover thousands of bikes each year, although many of these bikes are not linked to reported thefts and aren’t returned to their owners due to the inability to link the stolen bicycles back to their owners via the police database.  Reporting stolen items to police gives owners the best chance of being reunited with stolen property once recovered by police. Thankfully Hugh was successfully reunited with his very special Specialized. Southbank Police regularly donate bikes to charities where the owners cannot be tracked down •