The Leeds Car Cruise is a static meeting that happens on the second Saturday evening of each month and has been occurring for 25+ years. On Saturday 12th it was closed down in a very heavy handed and poorly explained manner by the West Yorkshire police. The reasons given were not a temporary ban due to the Pandemic. Despite the generally distanced nature of the event this might have made some sense. However this is not the reason that has been given.

They have used an injunction which was created to prevent anti social car behaviour. Largely this is meant to target the young people who have been driving in groups and road racing, often in residential areas causing risk and disturbance to the public and other criminality.

None of these quickly arranged events have been remotely related to the nature of the Leeds Car Cruise.  This is a long-standing static event where car aficionados park up their cherished motors and walk around them. It has been run on the private property of Burger King with their blessing, at a time when shoppers have mostly finished for the day. It has been consistently a positive and sociable event. On rare occasions lone individuals have driven in an anti social manner on arrival or departure. The organisers have always gone to great lengths to condemn this behaviour and would encourage the WYP to attend this event and target those stupid individuals. Their presence would probably prevent it  happening in the first place. 

What is extremely unfair and also counterproductive is to target the event as a whole. WYP and the Leeds City Council would do well to encourage an event like this to show they are targeting specific behaviour and not unfairly punishing a large community of people. They should be policing for the benefit of their community and with its blessing. This action was not called for and shows the WYP as being incapable of intelligently targeted policing and also wasting their valuable resources.  By closing this event down they would drive people towards the very type of events they wish to prevent. 

We ask that the WYP and Leeds City Council show some flexible thinking and retract the use of this injunction in relation to this positive community event and instead support it.