WATERLOO REGION POLICE PARTNER WITH PROJECT 529
Cyclists in Waterloo Region have a new tool to help protect and recover their bicycles from theft. On Aug. 7, 2025, Waterloo Region Police (WRPS) launched its partnership with Vancouver-based Project 529 at The Hydrocut in Kitchener. The program allows cyclists to register their bicycles and alert police, bicycle shops, and other registered users in the event their bike is stolen.
In a Waterloo Region Police announcement of the partnership, Chief Mark Crowell said over 5,400 bikes were reported stolen between 2019 and 2024, but only 432 were successfully recovered.
The local partnership lead, WPRS Constable John Heaton, was inspired by his experiences using Project 529 during suspected bike theft stops. He learned about the platform during an online search for bike registries and began using it to look up suspected stolen bikes.
“There were several instances where bicycles were not registered on the traditional databases, but they were registered on the 529 database. So, I was able to recover a bunch of bikes and return them to their owners, years after they had been stolen, which is awesome,” Heaton said.
Project 529 was launched in 2013 to address the large number of recovered bikes that went unclaimed at the Vancouver Police Department (VPD). Rob Brunt, Project 529’s chief outreach officer, was a police officer with VPD at the time and said he was inspired to take action after seeing the department’s property office filled with bikes.
“They had 400 bikes in a storage system and another 100 on the ground. I’m an avid cyclist and thought it was crazy. Whose job was it to get these bikes back to owners,” he said.
VPD, like many police departments, holds stolen bikes for 90 days before selling them at auction or disposing of them as surplus property. Brunt said that without a way to identify a bike’s owner, the police have no way to return it if it is recovered.
“The police don’t have a way to do it. The public then goes, ‘Well, why would I phone the cops when they don’t have a tool to do anything anyway?’ The only people that win in that scenario are the thieves,” he said.
Brunt raised the issue with the VPD chief and asked if the department’s IT team could develop a solution. Instead of handing it off, the chief assigned the task to Brunt.
“That’s how I got assigned to it. I searched across Canada and the U.S. for an existing solution, and just by a fluke ran into people who knew someone building a solution for this,” Brunt said.
That person turned out to be J. Allard, a former Microsoft executive who launched the Xbox gaming platform. Allard had been developing Project 529, and Brunt said the app met all the requirements he envisioned for the solution.
“He’s the inventor of Xbox. The only person above him at the time was Bill Gates,” he said.
After connecting with Allard, Brunt and the VPD launched Project 529 in Vancouver. Brunt said reports of bike thefts dropped 35 per cent after launch.
“I was on the job 25 years. We don’t reduce property crime by double digits. That’s unheard of. I checked the arrest rates and custody times…Nothing had changed,” he said.
“It was the registrations combined with the 529 Shield. The crooks figured out that the shield meant that the bike was registered, so they left them alone,” Brunt said.
“So if you come out of a coffee shop and your bike lock is on the ground, you can use the app to mark your bike stolen. It acts like an Amber Alert to everyone within 15 [km] of you,” Brunt said.
CycleWR board member Aldo Culquicondor welcomed the WRPS’s partnership with Project 529. The local cycling advocacy group has purchased 529 Shields for its members that can be picked up at events throughout the year.
“Our goal is that everybody in the community knows that this program exists. The more people know about it, the more effective it is in preventing theft,” Culquicondor said.
With the partnership, the WRPS is notified when a bike is reported stolen in the area. Heaton said Project 529 is giving his fellow officers a new tool to help return bikes to their rightful owners and reduce thefts.
“Now that we’re working with 529, and the hope of as many people as we can get registered, when we make these stops and we run the bikes, they’ll come back as registered to someone or reported stolen already, and then we have more than enough authority to seize that bike and make an arrest and get the bike back to the owner,” Heaton said.
Registration for Project 529 is free and can be completed on the website project529.com or through its mobile app. Each registration can include the bike’s make and model, serial number and photographs. The optional 529 Shield is a tamper-proof sticker that can be scanned by police or bike shop staff.
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