A petition has been launched to save the police helicopter base at Durham Tees Valley Airport.
Campaigners believe the decision by the National Air Police Service (NAPS) to scrap the base - with the nearest helicopter coming from Newcastle or Leeds - would prevent helicopters from reaching incidents quickly enough.
And now a petition which urges the Government to take action to keep the helicopter on Teesside has been launched.
“The plans to move the Cleveland Police helicopter and crew up to Newcastle will have a detrimental impact on the effectiveness of the service and response times of air support,” the campaign set up by Twitter member @JHind83 reads.
“It will also reduce the feeling of safety that having the service based locally gives to members of the public and will play into the hands of criminals.”
When the closure takes effect during the 2016/17 financial year, Newcastle will become Teesside’s closest base.
Author and retired North Yorkshire police officer Mike Pannett, blasted the move and said that the Home Office’s original targets for the service would now be further from reality.
He said: “I am doubly concerned about those targets now. The loss of further bases will be disastrous on a number of levels, not least for the areas which are losing them.
“It seems like they are putting the savings above the service to the public and I also feel dreadfully sorry for the men and women who served at those bases.”
The latest tweets from the police helicopter’s Twitter account read: “In the last 12 months to date we have directly found 57 persons, reported as missing, and assisted with the locating of 70 missing persons.
“Crews from this base have also directly found 25 injured or vulnerable persons and assisted with the finding of 21 others.”
The move means pilots will have to travel further to support officers and Cleveland Police will be competing against more forces for the use of the helicopter, raising fears it will receive a “second-rate service”.
The announcement received a backlash from the public, with many taking to social media to vent their anger.
On Facebook Jason Rossiter wrote: “This is ridiculous. This service was kind enough to rush me and my mum down to my brother when he had a car crash.
“We couldn’t thank them enough, and we were part way into fundraising for them. Can’t believe it’s being shut down. God help anyone that needs help quicker than police cars can get there.”
Stephanie Evans commented: “Bad decision. We need these services based locally. There is no way Newcastle can respond to an incident in the Tees Valley in an appropriate time scale. This is lives we are talking about!”
Michael Springbok Tucker said: “First the mounted section and now this, it’s almost like they want the crime rates to go up or something!"
Cleveland’s Labour police and crime commissioner Barry Coppinger initially released a statement on Friday in which he said he was “disappointed” that NPAS had decided to close the DTVA base.
But the commissioner, who is an NPAS board member, later told The Gazette that he had backed the move - and then defended the decision to move the helicopter away from Teesside.
“At the end of the day we have had to make savings of £18m,” he said.
“We are paying £1.4m for the air support at the moment and I want to negotiate that down quite substantially.
“We can’t afford the subsidies on the current level of air support.
“We are not losing air support, air support is being reorganised.
“We will get air support when we need it. We can call on it 24/7.”
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