Specialist road training has been delivered to rural police officers to enhance skills around responding to collisions and targeting criminals.

Northumbria Police officers responsible for keeping the region’s most rural communities safe completed specialist roads policing training last week.

Rural officers cover everywhere from Haltwhistle to Horncliffe, and underwent a special two day advanced course.

The training, provided by experienced Motor Patrols officers from the Force, focused on enhancing rural officers’ skills and knowledge around attending to and responding to collisions and sharpening disruption techniques targeting travelling criminals.

Superintendent Sam Rennison of Northumbria Police’s Northern Area Command praised the training.

"Rural Northumberland is a vast area and it’s an area like no other in our Force. That’s why it’s so important that our officers covering the hardest journeys to parts of the Force are given advanced specialist training to help them protect and serve the communities they police to the very best of their abilities.

Rural officers do not typically face the same challenges that their city-based colleagues do. The Northumberland countryside is so extensive that there’s only one way for law breakers to move around our region with ease – that’s by using our rural roads, making advance motor patrol skills extremely useful.”