North Yorkshire Police has a planned week of intensification around roads policing.
This is a week that coincides with:
- The easing of lockdown restrictions, which is expected to create a significant increase in leisure and tourism traffic in North Yorkshire
- Global Road Safety Week, when police forces join an international road safety initiative and proactively target illegal vehicles and drivers.
Today (19 May 2021) Harrogate has been the focus of attention, and many will have seen a greater number of vehicles patrolling.
TS Richard Harrison, North Yorkshire Police, Roads Policing Group:
The problem is that everyone is coming out at once, and we have seen a significant increase in the number of collisions, traffic offences and anti-social behaviour on the roads.
We are deploying to one area, en masse, for maximum impact. We find that if we send a single car here and there, it doesn’t achieve as much when we work as a group.
Today we have 6 cars in Harrogate, along with ANPR support in the control room, all working together, and it creates much more of a deterrent.
We will be moving around the county, so we will be somewhere different tomorrow. It keeps people guessing, and it helps hammer home road safety.
We are looking at everything, drink-drug driving, no insurance, no licence, no MOT, no tax, seatbelts, mobile phone use while driving, antisocial use of vehicles, use of vehicles for cross-border crime and crime in general.
It’s proving already to be creating better results.
