Taking five seconds out of the day can save your bicycle. University of North Carolina Wilmington students need to secure bicycles to the bike racks, as bicycle larceny increases during the month of October.

     Previous data from the UNC Wilmington Police Department displays an increase in bicycle theft during the month of October. This year alone, 87 bicycles have been stolen, and last year 165 bicycles were stolen.

     There are countless ways to prevent bicycles from being stolen. Always lock bicycles to a bike rack. Buying a sturdy, well-built lock, called a U-bolt lock, will ensure that the bicycle is harder to steal or cut loose with bolt cutters.

     “Park your bikes in a high visibility area,” said Charles Bost, Crime Analyst and Detective for the UNCW Police. “Periodically check on your bike, and register your bike.”

     Registering bicycles with the UNCW police department is a requirement and is free. Bike registration requires contact information and details about the bicycle. Bicycle recovery is more likely if the bike is registered through the UNCW police department.

     “Bike larceny is a crime of opportunity,” Bost said. “We have a lot of individuals, in some situations that will drive around in trucks and just pick up bikes.”

     A situation that often leads to bike larceny is when students engage in what Bost calls a “lend-lease policy.” This policy involves a person taking an unlocked bike and “borrowing” it to ride to class. This bike will be left at that class, unless the “borrower” returns that bike.

     “[Other] individuals we have caught are just going around picking up bikes and taking them to pawn shops or to consignment shops and trying to sell them there to get some money off of them,” Bost said. “We have people that will go get bikes and repaint them just to ride around town.”

     In order to keep track of all the bicycles on the UNCW campus, the police department uses software to record and track each registered bicycle.

     “We issue a sticker [with] a number that gets put on the bicycle, and we register all the numbers into our record management system,” Bost said. “Then we put up the basic history of the bicycle in there—so if has been reported once, then recovered, that is all tracked in there.”

     The registration system has built in security measures to ensure that bicycles are not easily erased from the registration system. The stickers that the police put on the bicycles have the same tamper proofing as the license plate registration stickers from the Division of Motor Vehicles. If the thief attempts to remove the sticker it will peel apart and not come off in one piece.

     In order to keep riding a bicycle to class and back to the dorm rooms, it is a good idea to register bicycles before the month of October. If a bicycle is stolen, and it was never registered, the chances of recovery decrease. The UNCW Police Department recommends three ways to keep bicycles safe – lock it up, use a good lock, and register it as soon as possible.