Regional Roads Policing Team

The Regional Roads Policing Team is the first operational team created by joint collaboration between the four forces of Yorkshire and the Humber.

The team was set up with a clear strategic vision to create a hostile environment for criminals that use the road network and cause significant disruption to their illegal business enterprises, from drugs to high value vehicle theft, to people trafficking. It is committed to supplying additional capability to the four police forces of the region wherever needed across the whole of Yorkshire and the Humber.

This is the first region in the UK to trial a Strategic Roads Policing approach where the focus is upon crime first and boundaries second. The Regional Roads Policing Team is made up of officers and staff seconded from the four police forces in the region. Operating as a roads crime unit the success of the team is largely due to a combination of highly trained officers deploying specialist skills, sophisticated in-car ANPR technology, and intelligence led information supplied by the Regional Intelligence and in-force intelligence bureaus.

The Regional Roads Policing Team is one of the first of its kind in the country with operational units based at Wakefield, Sheffield and Tadcaster and an Operations & Planning unit based in Wakefield. Each team has ten officers led by a Police Sergeant and is at the forefront of regional working, combining the resources of the four forces and collectively giving them better capacity and capability to deal with crime for the benefit of people within the region.

The Regional Intelligence Unit - Read more…

The Regional Asset Recovery Team - Read more…

Operation REGAIN - Read more…

Assistant Chief Constable Alan Leaver of Humberside Police is Chair of the Heads of Operations Group. This group comprises the Chief Superintendents of the four police forces of Yorkshire and the Humber who manage the individual operational support departments of the four forces. Mr Leaver gives an update on some of the collaborative work undertaken to date and some plans for the future.

“We are currently investigating areas of operations where we have the potential to work together to improve what we do - by becoming more effective operationally - whilst at the same time becoming more cost effective.

“Primarily, this is not about saving money. It is about adopting a culture where we can add value through joint working and we are looking at a number of pieces of work such as roads policing, firearms and public order.

“We are looking at ways we can most effectively plan for big events, both foreseen and unforeseen. An example of this would be that we are considering how we can supply officers, as a region, to the 2012 Olympics in London.

“An area of work which has already proved successful is driver training. We have developed a format that is broadly similar across the four forces and brings some harmonisation in terms of how we train our police drivers.

“There have been benefits inasmuch as we have devised a standardised basic requirement and this has led to reducing some of the time spent delivering driver training, but which still fully equips our officers for the job they need to do.

“It is still very early days in terms of our collaborative work across the four forces. What we are trying to do is to highlight relatively straightforward areas of policing where we think we can work together for our mutual benefit and reap the rewards in terms of more effective operational practices.”