Bikes have been stolen

Can you believe it, but we have had yet another break-in and they have stolen Rob's, Chris and Morten (my brother's) bikes.

Here is a copy of my letter I sent to our local newspaper.

On Monday afternoon my youngest son came to ask me where the bikes have gone? After realising he was not joking we discovered that 3 adult bikes were stolen from our property. The bicycle's were mounted against a wall, chained and padlocked together.

We have 3 dogs on the property that bark at anything that moves outside our walls and we can only assume that since we are on a corner plot, the thieves must have distracted the dogs at one side oft he property whilst the remaining thieves jumped the wall, took their time to negotiate through a huge mountain of things in front of the bicycles (we had just emptied out our house to have our floors done), taken bolt cutters to cut the chain, removed the chain threaded through 5 bikes (imagine the noise), each attached to hooks on the wall, then lifted the bikes off their hooks and carried them over the wall.

The bikes are insured so that is not the problem, what makes me so ANGRY is the invasion of my personal space, the fact that my youngest child last night was worried about them coming back and spent the evening creating his own booby trap to catch the 'bad buys' On top of all this we have visitors from overseas (people that left the country because of amongst other things, crime) that have had to experience this.

Although we have a highly sophisticated alarm system, intruder proof glass, burglar bars etc, we are now going to install beams across our property at huge, unexpected and unbudgeted for cost, for peace of mind and to create one more layer between us and THEM!!. The inconvenience and time taken to resolve this issue with having to take time off work to go and report it tot he police, contact the insurance company and get quotes for replacement of the bikes is able to be quantified, but the emotional damage to my children and myself is unable to be quantified, let alone my husband who is overseas and having to deal with this remotely, worrying that his family are safe, all it does is fuel my anger towards criminals in this country. Why is it that we the public are made to continuously pay and pay and pay, yet our country cannot even provide us consistently with 2 SAPS vans per sector as they are allegedly supposed to do.

This incident - my 5th in the past 6 years has made me suspicious of any person walking around our neighbourhood that doesn't look as though he belongs, as this was clearly a planned theft, in that they must have had spotters checking out the lay of the land and planned how they were going to do it. We often have people ring our bell, offering to sell us stuff, begging, looking for work etc. THIS IS THE REASON WE PATROL AND ARE INVOLVED WITH OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH.

I personally will be doing everything I can to support the proposed Constantiaberg CID as this is the only way to create a 'Virtual Fence' around our suburbs with monitored cameras, adding one more layer to the security of my family.