Ant Anstead - Cops and Robbers

The original concept was brilliant and, more importantly, it worked very well indeed and without doubt changed the face of British policing forever. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that Oxford Dictionary definition!

The Unit Beat Policing, or UBP, scheme changed policing in the UK as well as providing a whole new livery and type of police car to talk about in this book! However, the very beginnings of the concept of mobile policing using a cheap economical vehicle so that a wider area could be covered was the quite wonderfully named ‘Noddy Bike’ scheme. From the early 1960s bobbies in selected areas were given Velocette LE motorcycles in an effort to achieve greater mobility. The name came about because those constables riding them were exempt from saluting senior officers, this being a potentially lethal practice while riding a bike at 40mph! They were allowed, instead, to merely nod their head, a massive change in protocol which, if we had the time and space, could be argued to be the beginning of the end of the old police services’ quasi-military structure … The LE (which amazingly enough apparently stood for ‘little engine’) was introduced in 1948 and was a strong, tough little bike with a smooth and very quiet running transverse, water-cooled, side-valve, flat-twin, 4-stroke engine of, initially, 149cc, although later versions used a 250cc unit. It wasn’t a bike for bikers but rather a machine for transport, and it added as much civilisation and comfort to the motorcycling experience as it was possible to do in that era, originally being fitted with a hand-operated starting lever, for instance, although this design was later dropped in favour of a kick-start. It started the police on a road towards mechanised movement for beat bobbies, but was used mainly in rural areas and by no means exclusively to move between beats in the way the UBP was developed. It’s important to say it wasn’t the start of panda cars, although people often speak of them as such on the web, but it’s equally fair to say that they were a signpost on the road towards the panda car, and no discussion of this policing theory and practice is complete without at least a nod to the Noddy bike.

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