One in custody following a chilly early morning pursuit

The temperature plummeted to around -10 Celsius in some parts of the county last night but the bitterly cold conditions didn’t deter our specialist operations unit who were out proactively patrolling the 6000 miles of roads in the county.

At around 01.45am this morning, a roads policing officer spotted a van parked on a rural road at Flixton near Filey.

The officer illuminated his blue lights, but the driver didn’t want to stop and accelerated away. What followed was a 30 minute pursuit along numerous rural roads which were covered with ice and snow. In York, one of our duty Force Incident Managers was monitoring the live video footage and radio commentary to assess the level of risk to the public and people involved. Thankfully, due to the treacherous weather conditions the pursuit remained at fairly low speeds.

The van continued towards Filey, before turning off on the main road towards Grindale, it then went over the border into the Humberside area. Our force control room plotted up a unit with a stinger device in Burton Fleming who then successfully stung all four tyres.

The vehicle continued for a short distance before it was abandoned by the driver who made off on foot. We were joined by officers from Humberside Police and after a short foot chase the driver was detained in a garden.

The driver, a man in his 30s was arrested on suspicion of numerous offences which include  dangerous driving, fail to stop for the police, drug driving, theft of a motor vehicle and possession of a suspected class – A and class – B drug.

He currently remains in police custody.

Chief Inspector Tom Ibbetson from our Specialist Operations Unit said: “ This is another example of great work by our operations unit during proactive patrols in the early hours of the morning.

“We work around the clock in any conditions to target the people who cause the most harm to us and our communities.

“There is no let up, and we hope that word is getting out that North Yorkshire is not a place where you can get away with committing crime.”