Drone helps Bassetlaw officers recover stolen caravans near A1

The vans were stolen on January 2 from a site in Lincolnshire after offenders broke through a fence.

Inquiries by Bassetlaw Reacher team led officers to a site near the A1 in Blyth Road, Harworth, where a drone was deployed and the stolen equipment was spotted.

The caravans were soon recovered and a small cannabis grow was discovered and removed from the site. Investigations are ongoing.

PC Paul Henson, of Nottinghamshire Police’s drones team, said: “This is another good example of how we can use our drones to assist in criminal investigations.

“On this occasion we were able to confirm officers’ suspicions by getting a bird’s eye view of this site and finding exactly what we were looking for.”

Other uses for police drones include crowd control, searching for missing people and tracking down criminal suspects.

Last year was a record year for the drones team since it was founded in January 2020, after they clocked up around 550 hours of flight time.

Inspector Hayley Crawford, district commander for Bassetlaw, said: “My team and I police a very large rural area and we are working hard to deny criminals the use of our road network and our open spaces.

“We currently have more resources at our disposal than we have had for a very long time, and – as this case demonstrates – we are using those resources very effectively.”

Anyone with additional information about this case is asked to call 101 quoting incident 305 of 3 January 2023.