Better than Worcester police then. I had my bike nicked from a bike rack by a park & ride’s mini bus station. The guy working there spent a little while shuttling through the video and found crystal clear footage of the rapscallion arriving on a worse bike, messing around by my bike for a minute or two (cutting the lock), then riding off with it. You couldn’t hope for better evidence of the crime, and if he was known to police - he certainly acted like he’d done this sort of thing before - it would’ve been easy to identify him. The cops didn’t even bother to go in and see it.

After several weeks, I got a call from our trusty boys in blue about it. Ah great, I thought naively, they haven’t forgotten, just backlogged. But it quickly became obvious, from his leading questions, that the copper was actually hoping to catch me out as an insurance fraudster and had no intention of doing jack-shit to actually get the thing back. I lost it a bit with him and I think he did end up feeling kind of bad - although not bad enough to send someone round to view the footage of course.