IT would be easy to dismiss student Chris Graham’s experiment as a meaningless stunt, but it should cause a sense of unease amongst us all.

Perhaps it was not the most scientific operation, but for someone to go and cut the chain on a bicycle in nine different city centre locations in one day and be ignored by all is shameful.

Yes, cycle theft is hardly the most heinous of crimes.

But it is a crime and surely you would have hoped for someone, at some time, to have at least reported it to the police.

Dozens of people made a conscious decision that day that the theft of this bicycle was something they just did not want to be bothered with.

‘It is someone else’s problem’, is the underlying feeling.

That should disturb the senior police officers at Oxford, because the public are the eyes and ears of our force.

However questions should also be asked about why a man was able to walk around the city centre, carrying boltcutters and swiping a bike nine times without an alarm being raised by officers notionally on the beat or by our expensive CCTV systems.