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By Nick Nielsen

Police seeing uptick in bike registry numbers as spring begins

May 7, 2025 | 3:59 PM

Spring is here and the weather is getting warm, and with that people are getting out and about on their bikes more now in Prince Albert. Unfortunately, bikes are still one of the highest targeted items to be stolen, but the Prince Albert Police Service’s Bicycle Registry is one of the measures they are using to try and help get them back.

Sgt. Derek Simonson is the officer in charge of working the bike registry, and said it does make a difference in making sure bikes get returned to their rightful owner.

“It definitely helps. If we do have a bike that goes stolen, there’s record of it in our database and that provides us a little bit of a leg up to maybe locate that bike. If we do locate it right away and we know who we can return it, in some cases when bikes aren’t registered, we end up with a bunch of bikes and we don’t know who the owners are,” he said.

One of the biggest reasons the bike registry is so effective is because it gives police access to information that could help find your stolen bike so quickly. Because bike thefts can quickly become an unsolvable, having that information at hand quickly is big for the police to try and find it.

“The steps are pretty easy to follow and then it captures the make, model, the color, all of those things. We do know that, not just in Prince Albert but really anywhere in Western Canada for sure, if a bike is stolen, within 24 to 48 hours it’s in some cases parted, out it’s changed, it’s spray painted. The quicker that we have access to that information, the more likely that we might be able to locate the bike and return it to the rightful owner.”

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When it comes to tips that can help you prevent your bike from being stolen, Simonson suggests a few things: Keeping your bike locked up or in a secure location inside, make sure you have a picture, keep receipts and the serial number.

That said, Simonson added that the biggest thing people don’t do when their bike is stolen is report it.

“A lot of people feel that we’re too busy to take on bike theft investigations, but we encourage people to report it because sometimes that leads to other, bigger things. Maybe there’s a a yard or a house that has a bunch of bikes in it and and whatnot,” he said.

Not only can reporting your stolen bike give you the best chance to get it back, but it has in the past helped the police track down other criminals as well. In the past, police have found a bike that was reported as stolen, and it’s lead them to find other crimes being committed.

“It could be drug crimes, it could be other crimes that happen within the city. We know that bikes are used for transportation, and yeah, there are times where we’ve come across a house that has a whole cache of bikes,” he said.

Bikes that are recovered by police have been auctioned off by the city in the past if there has not been someone to claim them. If bikes aren’t in any condition for someone to use, they are destroyed.

Simonson also urged the public to check in on the city’s bylaws around bicycle safety for the season. You can find them here.