By New specialist off-road motorcycles for police to tackle motorcycle crime
Humberside Police have gained new specialist off-road motorcycles in a bid to tackle motorcycle-related crime.
Working alongside North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire Community Safety Partnerships, as well as community groups Big Local North Cleethorpes and Capacity Building Limited, the force hopes the new bikes will tackle the antisocial and criminal use of motorcycles across Southbank communities.
Speaking about the partnership that has assisted in bringing the motorbikes to our streets is Paula Grant, Managing Director of Capacity Buildings: “One of our specialisms is facilitating collaborative work with Humberside Police’s neighbourhood teams and residents.
“We enabled the specific support they needed to address community safety issues raised by residents.
“We followed this up by jointly working with all partners involved to find an acceptable solution for both residents and policing teams, which resulted in the formation of this new team.”
Humberside Police Superintendent Paul French said: “These new motorbikes are taking to our streets with officers who have over a combined 70 years’ motorcycle experience and 50 years’ police service in both roads policing and response driving and holding College of Policing training in both on and off-road motorcycle riding.
“The bikes themselves are Honda CRF300L, which are 300cc liquid-cooled single-cylinder bikes that have been modified specifically to our requirements. All riders will be wearing Alpinestars Class 2 Kit with carbon helmets fitted with both radio and Bluetooth communications. Each rider will have body-worn video capability to enable us to gather video footage of any incident they are involved in.
“The police officers who are riding these amazing machines have volunteered for these roles due to a passion for motorcycles and wish to address the issues of them being targeted for theft and used in crime.
“We have worked really hard over the past few years to tackle the ongoing issues of the misuse of motorcycles – seizing more than 300 motorcycles and quads in the past 12 months across our North and North East Lincolnshire communities.
“We know from listening to our communities the impact that this type of problem can have, and we are absolutely committed to doing all we can, working together with a range of our partner agencies, in addition to our local communities to take action and to make our communities safer and stronger.
“As part of Op Yellowfin we have spoken to hundreds of people in the community who have been really supportive of our work and I know they will be delighted to see our officers out on these specialist motorcycles, directly tackling those who are blighting our neighbourhoods.
“We continue to build and develop existing relationships with the local biker community, businesses and residents to help provide support along with solutions to tackle this issue head on.
“We continue to listen – and I again appeal to local residents and businesses to tell us about the problems they are experiencing – we will listen and we will use this feedback to help targeted our responses.”
