Methodology

1. Two types of data

The two data types are always clearly labelled and never blended into a single score.

2. Bike-specific data: Germany and Italy only

Whether a country's official data can say “motorcycle theft” depends entirely on how the national statistics agency categorises offences. Only two of our five countries publish a usable motorbike-level breakdown:

3. Underreporting caveat

Recorded crime statistics capture only thefts reported to police. Vehicle theft is widely underreported for several reasons: insurance may not require a police reference, owners may consider it futile, or recovery happened before a report was filed. In the UK, the Crime Survey for England and Wales consistently estimates actual vehicle crime at significantly higher levels than recorded crime.

We show the recorded rate prominently with a caveat on every page. We never present these figures as absolute counts of all vehicle thefts. Community reports provide complementary (though also incomplete) recency data.

4. Denominators — why per 1,000 residents?

Raw theft counts are meaningless for comparison — a city will always have more thefts than a village. We normalise by resident population per 1,000 because:

• Population figures are freely available at the relevant admin level from INSEE (FR), ONS (GB), INE (ES), Destatis/Zensus (DE), and ISTAT (IT).
• Registered-vehicle counts at commune / Kreis / municipio granularity are not publicly available for all five countries in a consistent form.

We rank areas within each country only. Administrative units have very different catchment sizes across countries — a French commune and a German Kreis are not comparable. A cross-country league table would be misleading and is not shown anywhere on this site.

5. Suppression and coverage caveats

6. Community report handling

• Anonymous. No account required. IP is hashed (not stored in clear) for rate-limiting only.
• Recency-weighted. We compute a score approximating a 90-day half-life — a report from today scores ~1; one from 62 days ago ~0.5. This surfaces active areas without overweighting historical clusters.
• Jittered pins. Display locations are shifted by ±~150 m deterministically from the UUID. Exact submission coordinates are never shown.
• Post-moderation. Reports are published immediately then reviewed. Spam, abuse, or implausible entries are removed; removed reports are excluded from all public aggregates.
• No data ≠ safe. Absence of community reports never implies low risk. We show an honest empty state.

7. Switzerland — intentionally excluded

Swiss Federal Statistical Office (BFS) PKS data is published under a terms_by_ask licence requiring written permission for commercial reuse. Until that permission is obtained, Switzerland will not appear on this site. Coverage would also be coarse (26 cantons only) with no motorcycle/moped split, making it low priority.

8. Data licences