£½ million cost of police helicopter (From Warrington Guardian)

£½ million cost of police helicopter

9:30am Friday 22nd April 2011 in News By Hannah Bargery

MORE than half a million pounds has been set aside in the police budget for Cheshire’s helicopter in the coming year.

The chopper has been providing searches for ‘youths with air rifles’, suicidal men and women and burglary suspects in Warrington after replacing a police aircraft in April last year.

There has been 134 flights in the past three months across Cheshire, according to a Freedom of Information request, but the cost of each journey is not known.

Sergeant Janet Griffiths, Cheshire Police’s air support unit executive officer, said: “The crew of the helicopter have a budgeted number of hours that they have to work with and each request to deploy the helicopter is assessed for suitability.

“Criteria used for evaluating tasks include the risk or threat to life, the length of time since the incident has occurred, if there is a suitable description of the suspects and containment of the scene and if the deployment of the helicopter is proportional to the request.”

Described as an ‘excellent asset’, the helicopter is used for searching large areas quickly with the use of thermal camera equipment.

Searches include looking for suspects following a crime, recovering stolen property such as cars and searching for missing and vulnerable people where there is a concern for their safety.

Jobs that the Cheshire chopper has been sent out to in the past three months have included finding a ‘high risk missing man’ in Croft, a search for a stolen car in the Burtonwood area after a pursuit along the M62 and a search for a man who ‘had assaulted a man with a bottle’ in Warrington.

Mrs Griffiths added: “The crew of the helicopter can provide critical information to the officers at the incident that they would not be able to see easily from the ground.”

The provisional budget for the air support unit is £522, 000.