Regina police hope bike registration app will help reunite recovered bikes with owners

The Regina Police Service hopes an app that registers bikes can help deter theft in the city or at least help reunite people with their stolen property.

The app, called 529 Garage, creates an online database of bikes. It requires users to register information about their bike, such as theserial number, label, make, model, colour and type. It also requires that the owner of the bike be pictured next to their property.

Users canreport a stolen bike via the app, and ifa stray bike is found, it can be used to search registrationsand hopefully help get the bike back to its owner.

Regina police Cpl. Melissa Boxallsaid people often are not able to give their bike's serial number when reporting a theft, which mean even if a stolen bike is found, it can be difficult to locate its rightful owner.

"About 95 per cent, we're finding, of our bikes that we recover we're unable to get back to owners. And the simple fact is people don't think to write down their serial number when they bought a bike," she said.

From January to August of this year,there were922 reports of stolen bikes in Regina, police said.Of those,98 were reunited with their owners although police found294 stolen bikes in total.

Serial numbers are rarely removed when bicycles are stolen, Boxall said, because they're not usually stolen to be resold.

"It does happen but it is not as prevalent as a lot of the public would think," she said.

"It's a crime of opportunitySomebody sees a bike that's not secured properly or not secured at all, and they're taking that bike so they can get to the next place they're going."

'An epidemic in this city'

Lisa Adams-Krahenbil thinks thenew registry system could be a good way to curb theft such as the theft of her 10-year-old son's bike earlier this week.

She said her son did have the bike locked up but it was stolen anyway.

"He was very upset. He was bawling. He just didn't understand, you know, how someone had got the code to his lock or how someone could take it," she said.

Adams-Krahenbilreported the theft to the police, but without a serial number, she doesn't have high hopes of getting it back.

While the app could help to recoverstolen property, Adams-Krahenbilsaid she hopes that something can be done to prevent theft in the first place, like putting bike lockups in more visible and supervised areas.

After her 13-year-old son, Ty, had three bikes stolen in 18 months, Tracey Folkhas decided that that enough is enough.

"It's an epidemic in this city right now," said Folk. "This was our last bike. Unless it comes back to us, this was the last bike, for sure."

In July 2018, the familycame home to find Ty's bike, which waswas locked up with a chain in their carport, was gone.

On July 30 of this year, he chained up and locked his bike outside a Giant Tiger. He walked to a nearby Subway and came back to find that once again, hisbike was gone.

Finally, on Tuesday, Folk's garage was broken into and Ty's third bike was stolen. Folk reported the theft to police but also used Project 529.

She's tired, she said, of "the simple heartbreak I have to see in my son's eyes" after losing another bike, "when for the third time he did everything right."

"This is how he gets around, and he's frustrated and I am sad."

She said that until she registered her bike with the app, she did not realize where to find the serial number on a bike. Putting out posts on social media and through the new app could yield results for Folk and her son, but she isn't hopeful.

"He's doing everything right and he's still being victimized."