2 year experiment concludes, thieves steal where they aren't being watched... even by a poster of eyes.

In a two year experiment on the university campus, the academics managed to reduce thefts from the racks with the eye pictures, combined with a short anti-theft message, by 62%. And there was also a noticeable difference in places without the signs, where bike theft went up by 63%, suggesting that the crime had been displaced to other locations, rather than eliminated.

For the first year the team monitored the level of bike theft at all racks across campus for a control figure. Then they placed the signs in three locations, leaving the rest of the racks without signs. They then monitored the whole lot again for a year to see what the impact on the level of crime would be.

Full story at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/item/watching-eyes-reduce-bike-theft
image from, and story learned from http://www.rad-spannerei.de/blog/2013/10/17/poster-mit-aufmerksamen-augen-reduziert-fahrraddiebstahl-um-die-haelfte/