Karen Neill, the London dealer who stood up to thugs she suspected were carrying knives and were threatening to steal her customers’ scooters, has made an impassioned public speech on the impact of motorcycle crime in London, telling the mayor, Sadiq Khan, and central government that they “don’t have a grasp of the scale of the problem”.
“They don’t have a clue that London’s citizens are under attack every single day. We don’t know if, when we go to work, we are going to come home in one piece.
“Our police have been taken away which, as citizens, is something we require. It’s a basic right that there are enough police on our streets to help us when we need them. We don’t have enough police officers trained in professional pursuit of those gangs on mopeds and motorcycles.”
Speaking at a Works Union London charity dinner last Thursday to raise awareness of acid attacks in the capital, Neill of Zenith Motorcycles in Tottenham, continued: “We need police and we need central government to wake up and come out of their bubble of safety and security and see that, every day, working-class people are being held to ransom at knife point, at acid point.
“What will it take to give us help? Who else needs to be injured or killed going about their daily life?
“I, for one, will do whatever it takes and speak out as much as I can to bring communities together and stand up against these thugs.”
She added: “I am doing everything I can within my industry to get people to listen, and unfortunately all Sadiq Khan can say to the Motor Cycle Industry Association is that it’s up to motorcycle manufacturers to make bikes safer.
“We all know, as bikers, that that isn’t going to help us when someone is throwing acid in our face or holding a knife to our chests. It’s unrealistic and it’s so out of touch it’s almost laughable ...
“We need government to give us money to get our police back on the streets and hopefully, as a community of hard-working individuals, we can come together, as we have tonight, and support each other and fight back and get central government to help us because that’s their job and they most listen.”
The full speech can be viewed on YouTube as
