Two large dumper trucks were stolen from a construction site in Leeds and used to cause damage to CCTV cameras.
At 10:48pm on Monday night (23 April) West Yorkshire Police were called to Kendal Drive, Halton Moor, where one of the trucks had been driven into a Leedswatch CCTV camera mounted on a post in the street.
The camera was knocked down and the front section of the vehicle overturned. Two further cameras in the area were found to have been damaged in the same way.
Enquiries established that the vehicle was one of two articulated dumper trucks that had been stolen from a construction site in Knowsthorpe Lane.
With support from the National Police Air Service helicopter, the second vehicle was found crashed and abandoned in woodland off Halton Moor Road.
Both vehicles have been recovered for forensic examination.
It was found that the vehicles had been driven from the site in Knowsthorpe Lane onto Pontefract Lane through concrete bollards leading to a subway under the M1 and across Temple Newsam golf course, causing damage to the course.
Both vehicles were then driven through woods off Halton Moor Road where one vehicle was abandoned before the other continued on to damage the cameras.
Inspector Mick Preston, who heads neighbourhood policing in east Leeds, said: “The two vehicles that were stolen are very large earth moving machines and the way they were driven over some considerable distance could quite easily have resulted in someone being killed or seriously injured.
“As it is, the incident has caused many thousands of pounds worth of damage to council-operated CCTV cameras, to the golf course, to the two vehicles themselves and to other objects, such as fences, along the route they took.
“This has clearly been a deliberate attempt to disable the CCTV cameras which are there to deter and detect crime and assist in keeping people in that area safe.”
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