For thousands of Calgarians, the beginning of spring-like temperatures means it’s a chance for them to dust off their bicycles and get ready to ride a lot more over the next several months.
But the Calgary Police Service (CPS) is also preparing to be a lot busier during that time, attempting to reunite stolen bikes with their owners.
“We see the peak starting in May through to September… A lot of people are out on their bikes,” explained CPS Sgt. Nick Wilsher. “So that this is now the time that we see a lot of the thefts happening.“
As of late last week, CPS had dealt with a little less than 100 stolen bike reports so far in 2026.
In 2025, 1,292 stolen bikes were reported to police in Calgary — but the true number of thefts is likely much higher than that.
“We’ll get a report, somebody in the neighbourhood said, ‘Oh, I’ve just seen somebody’s bike, it’s stuck in the bushes,'” Wilsher said.
Wilsher adds CPS officers patrolling the downtown area are also keeping an eye out for riders on bikes that could be property of someone else entirely.
“It’s like a $3-4000 bike, and this is someone who is definitely in circumstances who wouldn’t be able to afford that, so we’ll do checks.”
Wilsher spoke to Global News in front of a collection of bikes that haven’t been returned to their rightful owners, but says more often than not, that doesn’t end up being the case.
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The city partners with Bike Index, a universal database that has surpassed 50,000 registered bicycles in the city and has helped return hundreds of bikes to owners, valued at roughly $330,000.
“Usually we get about a third of the bikes back to the owner,” Wilsher said. “If you’ve registered it if you got that serial number, we can return it to you really easily.”
After two of his bikes were stolen from his garage in 2024, Julian Peralta set off on a months-long journey to get them back — which eventually happened, in two different ways.
“When I got home (after learning the bikes were stolen) I started walking around, saw the neighbours who had cameras and pulled the footage.”
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It was a sinking feeling that Peralta remembers to this day.
“Very defeated… we just wasted a bunch of time, working so hard,” Peralta explained. “We saved up for three, four months, did so much research and they were just taken away from us.”
Peralta says police found one of the two bikes a few weeks later.
The other one popped up on Facebook Marketplace about seven months after it was stolen.
“I got all of my buddies to message the guy and say they were interested… then I messaged him saying ‘I’ll pick it up right now,’ matched the serial numbers… and away we went.”
Of course, the best way to deal with a stolen bike is to prevent the theft from even happening.
“Make sure you’ve always got a really good lock. One U-lock is really good, two is even better… no matter where you are,” Wilsher said.
“Lock the bikes up in your own garage, in your own shed… keep them secured.”
Peralta is taking it a step further these days — saying he prefers to keep them at his in-laws in Cochrane instead.
“It’s a brand-new area (in Cochrane), everyone’s pretty homey,” Peralta says. “They’re locked up and the keys are taken out of them, the batteries are turned off, so there’s no way it could just roll away.”
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