- 5 months ago
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:01Rotherham, South Yorkshire. It's ten past nine at night.
00:05The traffic cops are after a maniac on a moped.
00:08On the wrong side of the road, without lights or a crash helmet.
00:15The bike has been stolen from nearby Sheffield.
00:18Five patrol cars are on his tail.
00:21They can only go one way, but the bike rider can go anywhere he wants.
00:25And does.
00:27PC John Boehm is one of the traffic cops chasing him.
00:31He's been doing this job for 13 years.
00:33Boehm knows bikers usually win because they stay off road and simply take to the hills.
00:40But this one's different.
00:42He's back on the road and dicing with a member of the public who's after him on foot.
00:48He's here.
00:49You'll get it soon, we've got him.
00:52He's on the job carriageway.
00:54I think this member of the public was trying to knock him off to stop him.
01:00But he became oblivious to this gentleman who was trying to help us.
01:04And what followed would be described as an interesting pursuit that was frightening for the motorcyclist as much as anything else.
01:13Left, left, left.
01:14He's doing a left, left, left.
01:16Left, left.
01:18Speed is not an issue in this chase, but recklessness and extreme danger are.
01:27You've always got to bear in mind when we are pursuing motorcyclists that they are more vulnerable than the motorist.
01:33They're almost on the lives of a pedestrian in vulnerability to injuries.
01:38It doesn't take much for it to go wrong.
01:40And it could be catastrophic.
01:43Other traffic cops are closing in, but usual weapons, like the Stinger, can't be used.
01:48You can't sting motorcycles for obvious safety reasons.
01:52You take the tyres out, that's it.
01:55What we aim to do is to follow them, basically, at a safe distance.
02:01Plus you can keep other members of the public aware that we are there.
02:05If they've got no lights or they've got dark clothing on, they're not going to see them.
02:09They'll see the traffic car with the siren and the blue lights flashing.
02:26But in the centre of town, flashing blue lights aren't much help.
02:31The traffic cops need to come up with some ideas, fast.
02:39The traffic car is going straight across another red light, you've got pedestrians on the left here.
02:55The idea is to use the patrol car to slow the biker down and then eventually force him off the road.
03:06It isn't working out.
03:07Just narrowly missed a parked van on the offside there.
03:12At this point, he then enters onto the pedestrian precinct.
03:15He's actually come into contact with the offside of the traffic car at that point.
03:19Bounced off it, got his feet down and then got his balance back up and then accelerated away through the shopping precinct.
03:25Where he reaches up to 30, 37 miles an hour.
03:29People are in the precinct and the traffic cops know they have to get ahead of the bike again.
03:38And as he goes right here, the traffic car gets to a gap where there's some railings on the left and then the traffic car.
03:49But he just continues through, taking the wing mirror.
03:54Amazingly, the brush with the patrol car hasn't unseated the biker.
03:58But it has put him off.
03:59He's lost his nerve and his balance.
04:03He's drunk.
04:04As soon as he fell off and I went up to him, you could smell the drink on it straight away.
04:10He wasn't quite with it.
04:13So obviously he was over the limit.
04:15He slows down and he comes off maybe 18 miles an hour.
04:20As you can see, he stands straight up.
04:22He just didn't have a care in the world for himself or anybody else.
04:26It took 20 minutes to bring the moped pursuit to an end.
04:32But bike chases are not the biggest two-wheeled problem the traffic cops of South Yorkshire face.
04:37Fatal accidents are.
04:38Fatal accidents are.
04:50In Doncaster, news is coming in of a bad crash involving a biker.
04:55Road accident investigator PC Whittingham is already on the way.
04:59A traffic cop who specialises in finding out who is to blame when people are seriously hurt or die on the roads of South Yorkshire.
05:08This is no ordinary crash.
05:10It's a hit and run.
05:12The biker who is critically ill was hit head on by a van.
05:15The van driver has disappeared.
05:17As you can see, it's obviously a very heavy impact with the front of the vehicle.
05:21I started to walk around the scene and gather the evidence and see how much damage had been done both to the bike and to the van that had hit it.
05:29And started to think, this is going to turn fatal.
05:33This gentleman will be very, very lucky to survive an impact like that.
05:36This purple here is paint transfer from the tank of the motorcycle.
05:42The van driver has obviously left the scene prior to police attendance, so there's a possibility that he may be drunk, a possibility he may be disqualified from driving.
05:50Or there's some other reason behind the fact that he's not waited for the police to arrive.
05:54So that's obviously something for the other traffic officers to sort out why he's actually left the scene.
05:57The challenge for PC Whittingham is to discover if it was the van or the metal fence which did the most damage to the biker.
06:03The initial information I was given was that the motorcycle had been going in one direction, the van had been going in the opposite direction and had collided.
06:12And the van had then tried to leave the scene and indeed the driver of the van had left the scene and not stayed behind.
06:18The contact is there with the orange mark in the middle of the road. The dark marks on the road are fluid from both the van and the motorbike.
06:26And then the rider has actually flown off to one side and hit the fence in front of the tree.
06:31And we think that the rider came to rest at the base of that metal fence.
06:34The word from the hospital isn't good. The motorbike rider died shortly after being admitted, realising PC Whittingham's worst fears.
06:51Too many bikers are being killed in Yorkshire. Speed and the attraction of the country's open roads have turned nasty.
06:59Almost 20% of road deaths and serious injuries in South Yorkshire involve bikers.
07:06Yet motorbikes only account for 1% of all road traffic.
07:11And every summer the carnage gets worse.
07:15The majority of riders are vulnerable at the end of the day.
07:19They are the younger end, you know, they get the bike, they get the leathers and off they go.
07:24And they open the throttle up and see how fast they'll go and see how it handles.
07:28But you never know what's around the corner.
07:31It's not only corners that kill.
07:33Outside Doncaster in the countryside, another bike has died on a stretch of straight road.
07:41Crash detective PC Whittingham is on the way.
07:45Being a traffic cop is not his only qualification for this line of work.
07:49He used to be a motor mechanic, so he's able to tell a mechanical failure from a fatal driver error.
07:54You tend to find that Doncaster is locally known as the flatlands because there are no hills at all.
08:00And it tends to encourage the kind of motorcycling and driving that isn't particularly brilliant.
08:06Because the roads are so flat and straight, it encourages you to exceed the speed limits.
08:12This is farming country and the bike rider ran into the back of a tractor.
08:22He died instantly.
08:24But was it a straightforward accident or must someone take the blame?
08:28Whittingham's investigation will be painstaking and officially published.
08:31An accident is something that lasts the mere twinkling of an eye.
08:36It's something that is in the region of sort of 120 to 200 milliseconds of time from the start to the finish of the actual incident.
08:44So you need to be able to sort of compartmentalise every segment of the accident and understand each individual piece.
08:51It's all a very, very big jigsaw puzzle and you need to be able to understand how it goes together and then write about how it goes together.
09:01Scenes of crime are going to be a bit longer sticking their photos and then it's just a quick rundown with the wheel.
09:06The crash site is sealed off, just like any murder scene, enabling PC Whittingham to reach conclusions quickly.
09:13It was obvious that the tractor had been travelling in one direction and that the motorcycle had been travelling in the same direction as a tractor.
09:22Virtually straight away you could see the debris field extended in a logical progression in the direction of travel of both vehicles.
09:30It wasn't a head-on collision with them both meeting.
09:34This road is straight for two miles. Speed could be a factor.
09:38The first thing I did was look at the actual road surface and saw there was quite a long skid mark.
09:44So that obviously showed that the motorcycle had been subject to quite heavy braking immediately prior to the collision.
09:49That's where the front tyre of the motorcycle has actually contacted the back of the tractor.
09:54The bike has then bounced on its side and slid down through these marks, through this area of debris, through these marks here,
10:03and come to its final resting place, laid in the road there.
10:05The rider has then carried on, rolling down the side of the grass banking.
10:10There is some marking in the grass. It's quite difficult to see, but it's a kind of an arced mark,
10:16which comes back to the white line at the side of the carriageway, to the circle where there's a pool of blood.
10:21I then looked at the tractor and saw the level of damage on that was fairly low.
10:25There's no significant damage to it, but it is a very, very substantial vehicle.
10:32So a motorcycle versus a tractor wasn't going to leave at a really massive amount of damage anyway.
10:40Bert, you can't see why he did it, can you?
10:42At the fatal accident scene, PC Whittingham has concluded that speed is indeed to blame.
10:51If we stand and look back, we are actually on the beginning of this motorcycle's rear tyre mark.
10:58And you can see how far away the motorcycle has ended up.
11:02So that would be indicative of a fairly high speed when it actually started.
11:06Whittingham's even managed to prove that the bike's brakes were locked on.
11:11The brake light bulb confirms it.
11:14The bulb filament is actually bent.
11:16This happens because the bulb filament is so hot,
11:19just like a piece of metal that a blacksmith will actually hammer into shape when it's hot.
11:23If the bulb had been off at the time, and it had been cold,
11:26then the filament either wouldn't have bent at all, or it would have just fractured.
11:30So this is indicative that the bulb was actually illuminated at the time that the bike came to grief.
11:33The investigations also revealed how the rider died.
11:37It wasn't the initial impact with the tractor that killed him.
11:40It took a lot of looking at the tractor in close detail,
11:44and the helmet and clothing of the motorcyclist to actually work out what had happened.
11:49And that he'd actually become trapped within the moving wheel of the tractor,
11:53while it was driving forwards, and it had actually pulled him into the wheel arch.
11:58And that's where and how he'd sustained the fatal injuries.
12:00It wasn't the speed of the crash that was the author of his death.
12:05It was the actual mechanics of him hitting the tractor where he hit it.
12:09If he'd have hit it anywhere else, he would have probably just bounced off the back end of the tractor,
12:14and got up and dusted himself down.
12:16But because he hit the exact point on the tractor that he did,
12:19that's what led to him actually dying.
12:20But why didn't the bikers see the tractor on such a long straight road?
12:26PC Whittingham believes the summer harvest might be partially to blame.
12:31Turning this wheat over, it's going to generate quite a lot of dust across carriageway.
12:35Now if it's been so much that it's got into his visor and caused him to blink or cough or splutter or anything like that,
12:41it's a possibility that that's, if not a causation, it's a possible mitigation.
12:48One of the other things is, see when it comes round here and it kicks all this out,
12:53you've only got to get that coming into your visor and filling your helmet up.
12:57And there's a strong possibility that this has sort of put him off.
13:00But he would have seen that machine a long, long way before this lot turned around.
13:05Definitely one to think about.
13:07Assuming that those machines were working at the time this took place,
13:12that is something I'm going to have to include in my report.
13:19It's such a thrill when you get on your bike and you get out on the open road.
13:24It really is a thrill.
13:26But it's how do we make it safe?
13:27PC Whittingham has managed to avoid the midges.
13:32He's inside, trying to draw a final line under the earlier fatal accident involving the hit-and-run van driver and a motorbike.
13:39The runaway driver has been found.
13:42But Whittingham now wants to know if it was the initial impact with the van which killed the biker.
13:47This could lead to charges of causing death by dangerous driving.
13:51We're talking massive impact forces and massive relative speeds between this glove
13:57and this piece of bodywork.
13:59That by putting this here, there's actually a scrape on the top of this stud,
14:04which matches up to a cut in the paint there and paint transfer backwards and forwards.
14:09So that's his hand there as the glove has been forced.
14:12Through looking at the damage to the motorcycle and the van, it was possible to set up the angles at which the motorcycle was in relation to the van.
14:23The collision caused a certain level of injury to the motorcyclist, but then the final collision with the fence caused the fatal injuries.
14:31I'm fairly sure of that.
14:35It's getting late.
14:37And in Sheffield, bikers are still causing trouble.
14:40He sees Steve Horton is waiting for a young man who's been seen riding a motorbike dangerously and without lights.
14:47He's in the right place and at the right time.
14:49But this is no ordinary motorbike.
14:53And Horton now faces the chase of a lifetime.
14:58It's an off-road motorcycle, a purpose-built trials bike, not designed for road use.
15:06He saw me and instantly he sped off.
15:10It's actually happening here, I believe.
15:17The bike isn't stolen.
15:19It belongs to the rider.
15:21He's on his way home.
15:24Horton's main challenge is to keep the bike in sight.
15:29First ride again onto a cure crack or something similar.
15:40Right, right, right again, stand by.
15:49Straight across the junction onto...
15:51The danger in this pursuit was it was a heavily built up residential area.
15:56Parked cars both sides.
15:58Housing houses both sides.
16:00Bike's not built for road use.
16:02He's just driving around in regard for any other road users or pedestrians that's nearby.
16:07It's becoming clear that if the biker decides to go off-road, PC Horton will be left floundering.
16:20So he's called in South Yorkshire's police helicopter.
16:23Call sign Sierra Yankee 99.
16:27General from Yankee 99.
16:29We've got two vehicles now in pursuit of this motorbike.
16:32Stand by for location.
16:34Horton has also realised that there's an added danger.
16:36The off-road tyres on the bike could cause an accident.
16:40If he hasn't got road tyres on, and he has to do an emergency stop because a pedestrian or a child runs out in front of him,
16:46or a vehicle pulls out in front of him,
16:48then those tyres, which are for off-road use only, are not going to allow the vehicle to stop as it should do.
16:55But this biker doesn't care about tyres. He intends to get away, whatever the cost. He knows where he is, and which fields to use to lose the traffic cops.
17:08He's come down, look. He's on the right-hand side of the road.
17:20Oh, he's going off-road, off Ecclesfield Road. Stand by.
17:25With one last desperate shout at the biker,
17:28P.C. Horton surrenders the pursuit to the crew of Sierra Yankee 99. He can follow no more.
17:38It hasn't worked.
17:41Oh, that's not fixed.
17:42But the helicopter's got a problem. It's night-sun searchlight has failed.
17:48Roger, just having some technical difficulties. There's a strike in the night, so I think the battery's going to have to run out.
17:54Just as well, the bike is throwing off enough heat for it to show up on the thermal imaging camera.
18:01He went off-road, and we're making his way up railway lines and grass tracks.
18:07But fortunately, the helicopter and followed it directed other officers into the area.
18:10On standby.
18:12And he subsequently went home, and he was arrested on his drive.
18:16Now he's gone down the drive of the house with the traffic car on standby.
18:20I think we've got him.
18:23The biker is 20 years old, with no licence and no insurance.
18:35But P.C. Horton's night to remember isn't over yet.
18:38On his way home, he's come across a couple of damsels in distress, broken down on the motorway and waiting for their father.
18:47Not for nothing is P.C. Horton known as the caring traffic cop.
18:50I'm just waiting for Dad to come and get us.
18:51How long's it going to be?
18:52Where you been?
18:53We came from Leeds, so it's basically used all that water just from Leeds.
19:02Right.
19:03So.
19:04I think actually the cam belt's gone.
19:13Oh, is that what it's been?
19:15When my mate turned it over, it was spinning quite fast.
19:18Which is usually a case that the cam belt isn't turning the pistons over.
19:23So if cam belt's gone, what happens then is as soon as you put it back into gear and let it clutch up, it'll have popped a piston or something like that.
19:31We waited for the father to arrive because we weren't happy to leave him on their own at motorway.
19:36Two young ladies on their own.
19:38You know, you've got to think of their safety, aren't you?
19:40All you need is a car to pull up with three or four lads in.
19:43Are you alright? Are you doing?
19:44Ah, we're going.
19:45We've been talking to her, we've got to listen.
19:47Dad's arrived at last.
19:48It sounds like it's, it could be something like, listening to how she's described it and that, it sounds like it could be camshaft or something like that, cam belt or something like that that's gone in.
19:57But then when the father arrived, he wanted to tow them back to Leeds.
20:02For PC Horton, an even bigger nightmare than the bike chase.
20:06It's not, I mean I've done it myself and it's not very nice being towed back.
20:10It's certainly not motorway in the dark.
20:11Yeah, I think it's worse in the dark.
20:13Yeah.
20:14It is because all you've got is your lights to look at.
20:17Yeah.
20:18And you're going to be literally only this distance apart.
20:20If you ease off and she's not on the ball, she's not seeing no brake lights, she gradually catches you up, catches you up, catches you up.
20:26She brakes, you accelerate to her, you snap tow rope and you're back to square one.
20:31It's in dark.
20:32Yeah.
20:33The last thing you want to be going up is 40, 50 miles an hour and something's in the road and you have to swerve.
20:38You can't swerve out of there when you're towing her.
20:40Yeah.
20:41It's fraught with danger at night to be honest.
20:42He'd only got a short tow rope and the two girls had never been towed before.
20:47So we basically recommended that they remove the car to a safe place and come back the next day when it was light and get it recovered.
20:55But the girls and their father were having none of it.
20:58Fix the towing hook and head for Leeds.
21:01Easier said than done.
21:03Another job for the cock, who cares?
21:06Could be it all night.
21:15I reckon that's the bar.
21:16It's not really good anymore, is it?
21:17That's it.
21:20That's good.
21:21Well, that'll do.
21:22Because we haven't got a knife to cut it off at the other end.
21:24And that includes driving the damsel's car whilst it's being towed.
21:29Put the seatbelts on.
21:30Find a good hat.
21:31Find a good hat in Bankland.
21:32Think I should do.
21:34I drove the towed vehicle because the two girls weren't happy enough to do it.
21:42The drunken moped rider who was chased through Rotherham was sentenced to four months youth custody.
21:52The coroner's inquest into the rider killed when he ran into the back of a tractor recorded a verdict of accidental death.
21:59The van driver, who ran away after hitting the biker who subsequently died, pleaded guilty to death by dangerous driving.
22:07The off-road biker, chased by PC Horton and the helicopter, was fined £300.
22:13While his damsels in distress were eternally grateful.
22:18And safe.
22:20Electric windows?
22:21Yeah.
22:23I'm impressed.
22:25We're parked up here.
22:26And they're going to come back and sort it in the morning.
22:29Daylight when they've got more time.
22:31And then everything's in order.
22:36Daylight.
22:37Daylight.
22:38Daylight.
22:39Daylight.
22:40Daylight.
22:41Daylight.
22:42Daylight.
22:43Daylight.
22:44Daylight.
22:45Daylight.
22:46Daylight.
22:48Daylight.
22:49Daylight.
22:50Daylight.
22:51Daylight.
22:52Daylight.
22:53Daylight.
22:54Daylight.
22:56Daylight.
22:57Daylight.
22:58Daylight.
22:59Daylight.
23:00Daylight.
23:01Daylight.
23:02Daylight.
23:03Daylight.
23:04Daylight.
Be the first to comment