Pc Jim Abram with some of the hundreds of stolen bikes that have been recovered in Oxford A new police team has declared war on thieves who steal more than 2,000 cycles from Oxford streets each year.

Pc Jim Abram, civilian cycles officer Warren Sharman, and crime reduction advisor Lindsay Jopling are working to stop the thefts -- which account for 10 per cent of all recorded crime in the city.

In 2004 there were 2,100 cycles stolen in the city, a figure which remains constant each year.

Pc Abram said: "If every cycle that was stolen was reported to us, that figure would double.

"We are aware of the streets where cycle thefts happen the most -- Magdalen Street, Broad Street, and St Giles.

"Those areas are being targeted by officers and they won't always be in uniform."

Pc Abram's team are also planning postcoding sessions where cyclists can get their postcode stamped on their bikes. Miss Jopling said: "It is really important for people to make their bikes idiosyncratic to themselves.

"Then it is more likely that if they are stolen and recovered we can prove the offender committed the crime. They can be postcoded, marked with UV pens, or made unique with scribbles and doodles."

PC Abram advises anyone who buys a bike to take a photograph of it and take down its serial number. "People should also buy a good quality lock and always lock their bikes to something solid," he said.

He believed the high numbers of bikes stolen in Oxford was due to the high numbers of students who find cycling the easiest way to get around.

As well as preventing cycle theft and making bikes easily identifiable, police are keen to reunite recovered bicycles with their owners.

At St Aldate's police station, a bicycle store holds hundreds of unclaimed cycles.

If they are evidence of a crime, they must be kept until that crime has been dealt with. Otherwise they are kept for six to eight weeks before being sold to a private dealer.

Pc Abram said: "They used to be auctioned off, but the public weren't happy that we were making a profit.

"There is the problem someone could be riding a bike bought in an auction, and meet the original owner.

"We started selling them in job lots, but that came over even worse because dealers were buying them. The only way we could make it acceptable was to sell them out of town."

Pc Abram is also working with Oxford City Council officers who periodically clear bike racks of cycles which have been left for long periods.

The cycle team is a reformed version of a previous unit disbanded a few years ago.