Lancashire police boss tells forces to stop selling seized e-bikes as criminals are buying them back
Lancashire’s crime commissioner has criticised other police forces for selling confiscated e-bikes and scooters which are then being bought by county criminals.
Clive Grunshaw told the panel of councillors which oversees his work that Lancashire police had a policy of scrapping all such vehicles seized by officers.
But he accused other forces of sending e-bikes and scooters to auction which meant some were finding their way to local criminals.
Mr Grunshaw said he had written to chief constables across the country asking them to stop the practice ‘as a way of making a few quid’.
The commissioner was responding at the meeting in Blackburn Town Hall on Monday to a question on the scourge of e-bike crime from Wyre borough’s Cllr Peter Le Marinel.
Mr Grunshaw told him: “We introduced in Lancashire a dedicated scramble bike team to tackle the e-bikes.
“They have been enormously successful.
“They have seized over a thousand e-bikes and scooters over the last 12 months.
“We have a policy where if we seize them, we scrap them so they have all gone and been scrapped.
“So other police forces are looking at the work that we are doing within Lancashire around e-bikes and scooters because of the police’s successful campaigns going round all parts of the county.
“It’s become a real deterrent.
“In Lancashire our policy is that we scrap the bikes that are seized.
“But that is not the policy of all police forces so I have written to chief constables across the country because what some of them do is once they seize the bikes they send them to auction.
“All that does is it recirculates those bikes.
“You can have auctions in Lancashire of bikes that have come from the West Midlands and that kind of thing.
“They are not Lancashire bikes.
“They are coming into Lancashire from other parts of the country so I have written to the chief constables to ask them not to send bikes to auction.
“It’s no deterrent.
“It’s just giving the bikes back to the criminals and the people that are using them as the transport of choice for drug dealing and other things.
“We absolutely don’t want that.
“So none of the bikes and scooters seized in Lancashire go to auction. They are scrapped.
“But unfortunately some police forces probably don’t even think it through.
“They just see it as a way of making a few quid.
“But actually the cost then of having to go out and seize these bikes again is far more.
“So it’s not the way to do things.
“As a deterrent you need to scrap them.”