Essex Police’s work as part of Operation Orbital was the focus of a feature on BBC One’s Critical Incident on Monday 28th August.
The programme, which aired at 10am and is available on iPlayer, follows the Road Commercial Vehicle Unit of Essex Police as they patrol the county’s roads in unmarked “supercabs” in a bid to keep our roads safe.
Adam Pipe, Head of Roads Policing, who was interviewed for the programme, said: “Operation Orbital’s focus is to detect and deter driver behaviour that increases the risk to everyone.
During the operations, Essex Police officers record drivers of all types of vehicles committing mobile phone, seatbelt, and other safety offences.
They also carry out vital safety checks on commercial vehicles to check they are not overloaded, that they are road-worthy and that the driver is not working over their hours. On the day of filming back in snowy December 2022, our officers stopped 25 vehicles and reported £2,500 of fines.
Across that four-day week, they stopped 89 vehicles and reported almost £8,000 of fines, with the money from these fines making its way back to HM Treasury.
'We want to tackle the factors that lead to collisions'
Sergeant Jason Dearsley, who leads Essex Police’s CVU and was filmed for the programme, said: “We welcomed the opportunity to show the British public what we are doing to keep Essex drivers safe.
“Sadly, every year my colleagues and I attend serious collisions on the M25.
"Our focus throughout these operations is to tackle the factors that contribute to these collisions and to identify high harm crimes committed on our roads that put other road users at risk.
“By collaboratively working to tackle offences such as not wearing seat belts or being distracted through using a mobile phone, we hope to reduce the number of collisions - something we are supporting through our work with the Safer Essex Road Partnership under Operation Vision Zero. “It’s our ambition to have no road deaths by 2040 and anything we can do now to help us achieve that can only be a good thing.”
The “supercabs”, which are funded by National Highways, afford officers the extra vision they need to see into commercial vehicles where the cabs are higher than normal vehicles, as well as look down into smaller vehicles where drivers try to hide their behaviour.
This elevated viewpoint helps catch those individuals behaving dangerously when they should be concentrating on the road ahead.
Similarly, Operation Tramline sees officers patrolling the entire Strategic Road Network that criss-crosses the whole of Essex, including the M25.
Essex Police’s Commercial Vehicle Unit and the Road Crime Team will combine forces again on this operation, which is planned to run for the week of 25th September 2023.
Extra Eyes
Help us reduce road collisions and casualties in Essex and make our roads even safer. Report instances of poor and dangerous driving through Safer Essex Roads Partnership's Extra Eyes initiative.
More than ever, irresponsible, dangerous and illegal road behaviour is being recorded by road users. Through Extra Eyes this footage can be sent to, and reviewed by, an investigator within Road Policing at Essex Police.
“Our job at Essex Police is to make our roads safe and to deal with those offenders who flout the law and put lives at risk.
“Clearly a significant amount of planning goes into such operations, but the results speak for themselves. Our aim is that one day, we will stop no vehicles during our deployment – every stop and action is a disappointment for us.”
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