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One of the ways of preventing the problem is the sharing of videos of aggressive policing. You might recall that the police said they would not pursue kids on mopeds a few years ago? This was followed by a sharp rise in such crimes.
Also see the deterrent effect of the close pass initiative. The media surrounding it in West Midlands was out of all proportion to the number of times they actually did it.
But yes, I agree it is not the best way of dealing with it, it is cheap and relatively effective and overall good for police public relations with the hang em and flog em brigade.
Much better to give the kids doing it meaningful lives; work, education, role models and stuff, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Also the helicopter thing, you won't know the helicopter is following you while you're racing around on a moped. They are a distance away, and surprisingly discrete, even though everyone else can see them, they are watching and recording with some powerful optics. Trouble is the time taken to get them in place, and the cost.
adroit-
One of the ways of preventing the problem is the sharing of videos of aggressive policing. You might recall that the police said they would not pursue kids on mopeds a few years ago? This was followed by a sharp rise in such crimes.
As far as I recall, that was following the death of the lad in Camden in a police pursuit. It meant that the police had to review their procedures. Now they claim they've come up with a 'safe' way of stopping them. I don't believe it is, and that there will be a serious case of police misjudgement soon.
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This was followed by a sharp rise in such crimes.
or a sharp rise in the consistent recording of such crimes. same with acid attacks.
Oliver Schick
ObiWomKenobi
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:
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.