Cumbrian biker wheelies past police speed enforcement
Police in Cumbria say a biker was clearly showing off when he wheelied past them without a helmet on.
It’s the sort of thing we’ve all daydreamed about: performing a wheelie in front of police who are out with their speed enforcement cameras and radar guns.
Most of us are intelligent or considerate enough to not act on that impulse. That wasn’t the case for one Cumbrian teenage biker last week, who shot past police no less than three times - performing dank nooners and “clearly wanting to get a reaction from us,” according to Cumbria Police Insp Andy Leather.
The incident took place in Carlisle as police were running a “road safety operation,” according to a report from BBC North East and Cumbria. We’re reading that as speed enforcement. Police said they were performing the operation in response to resident complaints of speeding and anti-social driving.
Police say the biker was doing both of those, riding without a helmet and on the wrong side of the road.
“He's been up and down three times, clearly showing off,” Leather told BBC North East and Cumbria.
That was enough time for police to get a drone into the air, which helped them to identify who the teenager was and where he lived. However, he remains at large because he wasn’t at home when police came to arrest him.
(As an aside: This kind of dedicated police work makes you feel really safe, doesn’t it?)
They didn’t leave empty-handed, though, confiscating a different motorbike from the address.
If you’re guessing that the suspect in all this was riding an off-road bike, you are correct. Young people on off-road bikes have been outwitting police and frustrating residents all across the country with increased frequency this summer. Just last week, we reported on police efforts in the Midlands to hunt down two-wheeling scofflaws, with officers in Telford taking to off-road machines of their own in an attempt to keep up.
For more motorcycling news, stick with Visordown.
Chris Cope is a fourth-generation journalist, originally from Texas. He has lived in the UK for roughly two decades and has been writing about motorcycles for most of that time. He has written for dozens of publications and websites in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
