Middlesbrough after the A66 crash: ITV News spends a month in the town
Reporters followed Cleveland Police and talked to residents in the place the title calls the UK's highest-crime town, two months after two officers were killed on the A66.
ITV NewsStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 275,806 views a day, 21 times a normal first day on this channel (13,163).
Inside the town with the highest crime rate in the UK
ITV News's title sets the subject plainly: "Inside the town with the highest crime rate in the UK." The town is Middlesbrough. Twelve hours after it went up, the film had about 185,000 views. A new video on the channel usually finishes its whole first day near 13,000.
The film begins with August. PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough were killed when their police car was hit by a vehicle traveling the wrong way down the A66, and the five young men in that vehicle also died. Cleveland Police have said all five may have had links to serious and organized crime. The description makes the point that crime and anti-social behavior were part of daily life in the town well before the crash. Over the following month an ITV team stayed in Middlesbrough, meeting residents and going out with officers as they targeted offenders. The description says they found a community that is sometimes scared but determined not to leave.
The comment section filled fast. In half a day it gathered more than three times the comments a video on the channel usually gets in a full first day. Many viewers single out a social worker in the film. Others keep returning to a scene with glass fixed to a children's slide. Long threads discuss police funding and the steel and heavy industry that once built the town and later left it, and several people who grew up in Middlesbrough describe how different it is from the place they knew.
It was a heavy day on the channel all around. Footage from the Uxbridge stabbing case and a report from France, where a teenager lost a hand during school protests, also ran several times past a usual start. The Middlesbrough film drew far more than either. Across the whole channel the day was a little quieter than normal, which makes the documentary stand out all the more.
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- ITV News
- Subscribers
- 2,250,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 8,602,354
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,078,276 (on a normal day: 1,258,801)
- Video published
- October 5, 2026
- Video views so far
- 185,134 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 275,806
The numbers
One long documentary pulled far ahead of everything else ITV News posted, on a day when the channel as a whole ran slightly below its usual pace.
