You know what? Bikes get stolen in Victoria. Most of the thefts are just so some jackass homeless person can get from point A to point B. There isn't some giant underground black-market bike theft/sales ring. All of the bikes that you've used in your statistics were abandoned by the people that stole them and were reported by the people that lost them. Don't get all "hero" about how the statistics say that you've recovered all these bikes.
The fact that a VicPd officer had a bike stolen right out from under him is just a sign of the times: nobody "respects" the VicPd, certainly some of us fear you (especially the law-abiding citizens), but very few people who live in the juristiction would actually count on the VPD to help if it came down to an actual emergency situation.
I've done my own poll, but it is certainly biased: its biased in the people that I've asked and it is biased in the nature of the questions that I have asked. The resounding opinion that I have heard is that everybody would rather deal with the RCMP when making a 911 call.
There are examples such as the Oak Bay murder house where a little girl's family was being killed by her father while she was hiding in her closet (only to be told that her cell phone contacted the wrong PD, so they called her back ring-ring) to the incidents of a teenager being seen breaking into cars a few years ago that Jamie Graham (I might have got the name wrong: the former chief of police in Victoria is who I am referring to).
The resounding opinion is that we'd rather interact with the RCMP, or at least officers that could actually pass the RCMP entrance exam and their training in regina.
I know that a lot of this has to do with past chiefs of police and their "aggressive" policing theories. I do also know that the officers that rose through the ranks under that system still hold their sway in who gets hired. An example of this is a fairly recent hire: a man who holds several fake "black-belt ranks (at least one that he made up himself) and, while running his own martial-arts studio, under at least three different names, has managed to work his way up in the ranks so that he is part of the "scheduled overtime" crew (people under the rank of sergeant that get payed well over $100,000/yr is nothing short of corruption... Check your own sense of ethics on whether or not Jamie Graham's legacy is good for the city on that account).