Moped-enabled crime

No easy answers, and I appreciate that the police need some sort of deterrent, but deliberately causing collisions is not the way to do it. I don't know what the rider in this case has done, but there is simply no guarantee that causing crashes won't go terribly wrong. I'm sure they had a few such videos to choose from, and I imagine one of the reasons why they chose this one was because someone in it says 'no visible injuries'--so, great! Yeah! We managed to knock him off without injuring him, so it's alright!

It is also a tactic that has been employed against cyclists:

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/307360/

First, you want to avoid engaging in any kind of chase in London. So many dreadful crashes have happened in the last few years alone. I've posted about this before. See:

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/12784976/

There was a bad crash following a chase in Penge in 2016, various links posted from here:

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/13188648/

Chases are often with both a helicopter and cars or motorbikes on the ground. It puts criminals under pressure and then these things happen. Helicopter time is expensive and obvious; a criminal might not lead police back to where they could arrest him more safely, but I wonder if it might not be better to back off on the ground and move in later. There have been suggestions that police could use drones to chase, but I don't know how far advanced that is.

Secondly, obviously some criminals are an active danger to the public. I could completely understand the tactic if someone was, say, randomly shooting at people. Of course you want to put a stop to that. Here's the justification given in this case:

“In this case it was simply justified for the manner of riding, on a footpath, through a park, endangering peoples lives.

“We can't allow that to continue.

[...]

“If we hadn't have done this, what would he have done further down the road.”

The documentary makers said he was arrested on suspicion of five offences, failing to stop for police, suspected theft of a motor vehicle, possession of a class a drug with intent to supply, failing a roadside drug test and dangerous driving.

It doesn't say whether he was riding dangerously before the police started to chase him. My suspicion would be that he wasn't and only began to ride like this once he started to be chased. It doesn't say what the nature of the initial police contact with him was like, so it's impossible to tell. But why would someone dealing drugs try to attract attention to himself by riding dangerously?

I appreciate police work is difficult, also the cuts to funding, etc. It's easy to say that it's always more effective, and safer, to tackle things at the root causes (prevention is better than the cure), and the police have to deal with things at the sharp end, when lots of factors have already gone wrong--the apparent ease with which mopeds can be stolen and not tracked, how they can then be used to commit crimes and get away, which hopefully @%-} 's bike won't be used for, and I've posted before about the spree in Islington more than ten years ago (cyclists had their panniers snatched off their bikes by moped pillion riders), where the police apparently knew where the mopeds were kept for a long time but couldn't take action for some legal reason. However, you see this so often that there's tremendous neglect, in this case of social issues, and then some superficial symptoms are addressed and videos like this get put out to reassure people something's being done when, actually, what really needs to be done isn't.

As I say, no easy answers. I still think the danger to the public caused by police chases is unacceptable, and especially today with better technology there must be other ways of apprehending such people.