Motorway crime busters launched

A GROUNDBREAKING collaboration on North West motorways which could have major implications for crime fighting in the Warrington area has been announced.
Cheshire Police has joined forces with Merseyside and Lancashire Police and the Highways Agency to form the North West Motorway Police Group (NWMPG).
The group will bring a genuine regional approach to motorway policing, “softening up” force borders, improving road safety and helping in the battle against serious and organised crime.
Today’s modern motorway network means that any driver can jump in their car and travel from London to Glasgow in a matter of hours. But it also means that the people involved in terrorism and serious and organised crime can commit a crime in one Force area and be over the border in a matter of minutes.
This is why it is important for Forces to work together at a regional level – and why the North West Motorway Police Group has been born.
The implications for Warrington – sitting almost on the junctions of the M6, the M56 and the M62 – are obvious
Based in the Highways Agency’s state-of-the-art Regional Control Centre at Newton-le-Willows, the NWMPG’s centrally located control room has been designed to ensure the best deployment of resources to incidents on the motorway network.
One serious collision doesn’t just affect the immediate area. Hundreds of miles of roads can get snarled up, causing misery for thousands and potentially costing the economy millions. By having a truly regional force joined to the Highways Agency, the impact of such incidents will be reduced.
Now, police control room staff taking and dealing with calls on the motorway network are working alongside Highways Agency control room staff who answer all calls from hard shoulder emergency telephone boxes, set electronic motorway signs, monitor motorway cameras and despatch traffic officers to incidents.
The arrangement frees up police patrols to focus on fighting crime and enforcement on the motorway network.
Cheshire’s Assistant Chief Constable David Baines (pictured) is the lead officer on the collaboration.
He said: “By becoming a regional group we will be able to look at the positioning of resources so we are able to achieve economies. This will free up officers and enable more intelligence led policing of the motorways. It also means we can have more resources operating from more convenient positions, so that we spend less time on travelling through each others’ road areas to get to jobs.
“Motorway police work will become a lot more ‘cross border’ and more ‘intelligence led’. In the past Traffic Officers and the police might have turned up at the same incident. This collaboration enables traffic officers to attend more of the day-to-day incidents, reducing this duplication and letting the police focus on criminality on the roads.
“Officers throughout the three forces are also looking forward to the idea of working across borders enabling them to tackle more serious crime by linking in with their colleagues in other forces’.”
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