‘I could catch 20 or 30 in a day’: The cycling ‘vigilante’ policing Britain’s drivers

GoPro-wearing bike riders are leading a revolution against reckless motorists – and it’s leading to a spike in convictions

Michael Van Erp has waged war on London’s dangerous drivers. Armed with a GoPro and an e-bike, he has filmed and reported over 2,000 motorists to the police since he started keeping track of their misdeeds in 2019. 
Van Erp routinely catches on camera drivers using their mobile phones, pulling out in front of him, cutting up or close-passing cyclists and once, memorably, inhaling nitrous oxide at a red light. He submits the footage to the Met Police and, after police action has been taken, he uploads it to his YouTube channel, CyclingMikey. Offline, he keeps track of the incidents on a mammoth spreadsheet. As a rough estimate, he tells me, 2,500 penalty points and £150,000 worth of fines have been doled out as a result of his efforts so far. 
But he is far from alone. In fact, the 52 year old is one of the growing ranks of do-it-yourself cycling crimestoppers fighting back against motorists in a road safety crusade. Like Van Erp, they film drivers and submit the footage to the police on a website set up for citizen reporting – and their interventions lead to tens of thousands of sanctions a year. 
This makes Van Erp, in some circles, deeply unpopular. He has been assaulted by drivers for filming through their car windows and is subject to a daily torrent of online abuse.
Kitted out with an action camera mounted on a black baseball cap (he doesn’t wear a helmet, and insists he has done the research to prove there is no safety benefit to doing so), Van Erp patrols the streets of the capital while on his regular commute.
His major coup to date was catching the film director Guy Ritchie – whom he did not recognise until he received a call from the Evening Standard newspaper – texting while driving near Hyde Park in late 2019. 
Ritchie pleaded guilty and was disqualified from driving for six months as he already had nine points on his licence for speeding offences. A string of other stars have also been caught out, including ex-England footballer Frank Lampard in 2021 and the former boxing champ Chris Eubank the year before. (Lampard was charged with using his phone at the wheel but the case was dropped after he hired the solicitor Nick Freeman, also known as “Mr Loophole”, who successfully argued that Van Erp’s footage did not prove the mobile phone was turned on or being used to communicate.)
Similar to Van Erp, Jeremy Vine records his own London cycle commute on a helmet camera and posts the footage on X/Twitter. He has described Van Erp as an “inspiration”. Van Erp has even made friends with some fellow law-enforcing cyclists online and says they occasionally meet up and go to Nandos.
You can make an illegal right turn if you’ve been collecting linen pic.twitter.com/3OCTRI4xPN
Recording his commute on an e-bike from west London to his workplace in north London (where he is a carer), Van Erp racks up hundreds of hours of footage a year – and inspires an army of fellow camera cyclists to do the same. “Every journey is gigabytes worth,” he says, “so I do have a very large storage system at home – about 150 terabytes worth. Most of it is just backups, because I have to keep the footage for court cases and whatnot.”
A typical video posted on social media sees him spot a driver in or around Hyde Park glancing down at their phone, usually in gridlocked traffic along West Carriage Drive. He parks up his bike and approaches them on foot, filming them through the window (in a manner that some may find sinister) and getting a shot of their number plate. Most are polite when they spot him hovering at their shoulder with a GoPro. Some plead with him – he only very occasionally relents. Others are apoplectic.
Occasionally, he pitches up at a spot in Regents Park, which he calls Gandalf Corner, with the express purpose of catching impatient drivers who think they can get away with making an illegal right turn. This seems to irk drivers the most. The most popular of these clips, which has accrued 5.1 million views and counting, shows one motorist so angry at being stopped by Van Erp that he repeatedly butts him with his Mercedes. Van Erp says the incident resulted in a £50 ticket for the driver for disobeying the rules of the road and a further £90 fine for ramming him with his car.
How many drivers does he catch per day? “If I were to go out looking for it, I could catch 20 or 30, but I couldn’t possibly hope to report that many. Just on my commute, I’m averaging one a day at the moment,” he says, but adds that road safety in the city is “definitely improving”. Perhaps that is because, as a result of his reporting and that of others like him, more and more drivers are feeling the full force of the law. 
Some will get warning letters, some fixed penalties, and some go to court. A small percentage of those plead not guilty or do not accept Van Erp’s written statement, in which case he has to attend court in person. “I’ve been to court between five and 10 times this year, which is not too bad,” he says. “It’s less than one per cent of the cases I report, thank goodness.”
The purpose of posting on social media is to show other cyclists they can do the same, he explains. “I think on my own I’m probably doing very little… but through social media I think that is having an effect, because it is making drivers worry about being caught, and it’s encouraging other people to report,” he says.
In turn, police forces say this is having a tangible impact on convictions for dangerous driving. Take the figures from just one police force: in 2017, West Midlands police had 208 submissions from people filming dangerous drivers. Last year, that number had risen to 7,145. In the past 12 months it has risen again, to over 11,000. Nationwide, police forces in England and Wales receive 150,000 such clips from the public per year, with an estimated 90 per cent leading to driver sanctions. 
West Midlands has set up a dedicated portal for members of the public to submit their videos, called “Operation Snap” or Op Snap. A list of the kind of offences to look out for includes dangerous driving, using a mobile phone, not wearing a seatbelt or failing to stop at a red traffic light. The force has published a 25 page document of sanctions from April 2024 alone. The reports within it are not all from cyclists – many are based on dashcam footage from fellow drivers.
“Around 90 per cent of the submissions we get end in positive action. That can be everything from a warning letter up to prosecution and a day in court,” says Sergeant Steve Evans, who leads the ‘Op Snap’ team for West Midlands police. “It doesn’t take long to do, and people who do take the time to send us their clips are making a real difference to road safety. Every one of the people who’ve been filmed like this and have had to pay the price should now be thinking again about the way they drive.” 
For Van Erp, success in bolstering road safety comes at a price. He is frequently called a “cyclist vigilante” – a term he despises – and much worse. “I don’t feel like I’m a vigilante, because I’m not bringing any punishment to the drivers. The only thing that’s slightly close to vigilantism is when I stop drivers at Gandalf corner,” he says. “But even then, I’m not doing it to punish them. I’m doing it to stop the immediate danger they pose of going round that corner on the wrong side of the road.” 
In a newspaper column, Jeremy Clarkson called Van Erp “the most dreadful man in Britain today”. “The abuse is insane,” Van Erp says. “There was an [online] poll where they voted me worse than Hitler. It used to bother me a lot because I wasn’t hardened, and I took it more personally. Now I don’t even look at it.” 
Yet it has also won him fans. When we meet outside The Telegraph’s office, Van Erp has not even had a chance to lock his bike up before being approached by a young man who watches his videos on YouTube. “Keep up the good work,” he says.