Pick Your District and the Hour You Walk Away
The hour in a Berlin bike theft report is not when the thief arrived. It is when the owner last saw the bike. Read that way the police file becomes a parking clock, and this tool points it at your own district and your own habit.
Case shape from the Polizei Berlin open dataset Fahrraddiebstahl in Berlin, 16,153 reports with an offence start between 1 September 2025 and 31 August 2026, pulled on 10 September 2026. Annual counts and the rate per 100,000 residents come from the Kriminalitätsatlas Berlin for 2025. District outlines come from the Berlin Geoportal.
Most bike theft advice in Berlin is about locks, and the police file says the bigger variable is when and where you let go of the bike. Click your district on the map, which is shaded by reported thefts per 100,000 residents in 2025, then pick the band of the day when you lock up and walk away. The clock fills with that district’s own twenty-four hour profile and the tool reads out the share of local losses that start in your band, how that compares with the city, how many bikes a week that is in your district alone, and three numbers that change the advice: how often a bike here went within three hours of being parked, how often it came out of a cellar or bike room rather than off the street, and what the median stolen bike was declared to be worth. The contrasts are real. Neukölln loses 36 per cent of its bikes in the evening band while Marzahn-Hellersdorf loses 25 per cent in the morning commute band, and Spandau loses more than four times the citywide share from cellars.
Why the clock is a parking clock
Each police report carries an offence window. The start of that window is the last moment the owner saw the bike, not the moment it was taken. Someone who locks up outside a bar at nine and finds the rack empty at midnight is recorded at 21:00. So the twenty-four hour ring here does not show when thieves work. It shows when Berliners hand bikes over to the street, and which of those handovers ended badly. Citywide, 31 per cent of losses were locked up between 18:00 and 22:00 and only 11 per cent between 22:00 and 06:00.
What the map is shaded by
Reported bike thefts per 100,000 residents in 2025, taken from the Kriminalitätsatlas Berlin, which is the police force’s own published rate rather than one calculated here. Mitte is the darkest at 1,068 and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg is close behind at 1,005. Spandau and Marzahn-Hellersdorf are lightest at 227 each. That is a spread of about four and a half times for the same bike and the same lock.
The three numbers under the clock
The three-hour share is the proportion of local reports whose whole offence window was three hours or less, which is the argument against saving the good lock for long stands. The cellar share counts reports recorded as theft from a cellar or bike room rather than from the street, and it runs from 2.6 per cent in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg to 11.4 per cent in Spandau. The median declared value is what owners told the police the bike was worth, which citywide is €900, with 46 per cent of bikes declared at €1,000 or more.
What it cannot tell you
It works at district level, so it cannot say anything about your specific street, and inner-district averages hide a lot of local variation. It counts reported thefts only, so anything nobody reported is invisible to it and the true totals are higher. The offence window in the published file is capped at three days, which is why the tool only ever quotes the short-window share. And a share is not a probability for you: it is where other people’s losses in your district clustered, which is the most honest guide available and still only a guide.