The driver was found to be almost three times over the legal drink-drive limit. For anyone who uses Cleethorpes Road in the small hours, this is the kind of incident that makes you check your mirrors twice.
03:40 on Cleethorpes Road
The near-miss happened around 03:40 BST on Friday while a marked patrol car was travelling along Cleethorpes Road. According to the force account, officers watched a vehicle behaving erratically and managed to avoid a collision when the car came close to striking the rear of their vehicle. The driver — a local woman in her sixties — was stopped at the scene and arrested on suspicion of drink-driving.
The wider picture across town
This is not happening in isolation. Humberside Police, working alongside the council's anti-social behaviour team and the WISE enforcement unit, have just wrapped a three-day proactive operation across Grimsby town centre — Victoria Street, St James Square and Riverhead Square all covered. The push produced community protection warnings, criminal behaviour notices, PSPO dispersals and stop searches that turned up Class B and C drugs. Neighbourhood Policing Sergeant Kieran Taylor has pointed to the working relationship with local businesses and community groups as the backbone of those results, and council member James Sawkins has publicly welcomed the operation as proof of commitment to reducing ASB.
That is the right tone — visible presence, named officers, concrete outcomes — and it is exactly what residents have been asking for. A drink-drive arrest at 03:40 and a daytime crackdown on the town centre are different operations, but together they tell the same story: community intelligence only works when the people on the other side of it show up.
What residents can do next
If you saw the incident on Cleethorpes Road in the early hours of Friday, or you have dashcam footage from that stretch, Humberside Police will want to hear from you. For anyone worried about late-night driving standards more broadly, the non-emergency 101 line is the right route, with Crimestoppers available for anonymous reporting. Straight answers come from straight information — if the force knows there is a pattern, they should say so, and that is the standard we should hold them to.