Not long after he became a TV personality thanks to his appearance on Police Interceptors, traffic officer Ben Pearson found himself at breaking point. Three years after being medically retired from the police, he’s a mental health advocate with two bestselling books. We caught up with Ben to chat cars, mind, and the highs and lows of road policing ahead of his ‘I Love You, Man’ talk at Caffeine&Machine: The Hill in November 2023.
In late 2020, Ben Pearson had seen enough. You could argue we all had by that stage in 2020, but Ben had been through a lot more than most. For a start, it takes a certain kind of person to be a police traffic officer. “It’s not for everybody…” explains Ben, who became something of a household name after appearing on three series of Channel 5’s fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Police Interceptors, between 2018 and 2019. “[The training process] sorts out the people who can’t stand either driving fast or dealing with dead bodies. It’s quite a niche mix… you go on your courses and look at each other and think ‘you’re a strange set of lads and lasses.’”
As a child of the late ’70s and early ’80s, growing up mainly in the Bradford area with a five-year spell in Spain, Ben had been glued to his parents’ TV screen during the heyday of the cop show. He namechecks T. J. Hooker, Dempsey and Makepeace, and CHiPs. They’re all shows we look back on now as cheesy, tacky and very much products of their decade, but their effect on a young Ben’s future goals was undeniable.
Diagnosed with dyslexia early on, Ben freely admits that he struggled in school, and after leaving education in 1992, he worked a series of odd jobs before moving on to a sales role in a local BMW motorcycle dealer. “At the time, nearly everyone I sold a bike to was a police officer. They said ‘why don’t you try out for the police, put your application form in? You seem of the right temperament’. I got an interview, got through the fitness test, and got accepted [to West Yorkshire Police] on 1 October 2001.
“I did two years on the beat, then two years as a trainee constable, and a little bit on the drugs team. All my friends that I worked with wanted to go into firearms, and I just thought ‘I’d like to chase cars.’”
Making this move is, unsurprisingly, not a simple case of being called into the office one day, being offered a promotion and walking out a traffic officer. The training process is, to say the least, rigorous. “You’re learning advanced driving, how to assess vehicles, weights and measures, driving licence categories, you need your authorisation to seize cars… and right at the end, you’ve got your advanced course, and if you fail, you’re kicked off and you’ve got to go back to beat. It’s a very, very hard and stringent training process, and it’s not for everybody.”
Once Ben had made it through the training programme, he was supplied with a Volvo V70 T5, the first in a series of big, powerful saloons and estates of the kind favoured by road policing teams. “It’s the best job in the force,” says Ben unequivocally. “You’re out in a fast car, being the best you can be. It was phenomenal.”
It’s appropriate, having been so inspired by cop shows as a kid, that Ben would ultimately become the star of one himself, albeit something far more grounded in reality than those motorbike-jumping, leather-jacket-wearing, karate-chopping heroes of his youth.
Police Interceptors started following West Yorkshire Police’s Roads Policing Unit in 2018. “I’d just come back off leave, and I was tutoring a lad known as ‘Baby Ben’. He’d just been out [with the camera crew], and said ‘it was really good fun, why don’t we do it?’ I never wanted to do it, but he talked me into it.
“I turned up on the first day, got in the car, and within a couple of minutes we were in a pursuit. I heard a ‘beep-beep’ in the back of the car as the camera turned on.” This is what Ben refers to as his first ‘golden job’ on Interceptors. A high-speed pursuit of a stolen car around Keighley, which led to a foot chase and the successful recovery of the car, made for gritty, exciting TV, and Ben was asked by the producers to appear as a regular on the show. “It was the best thing I’ve ever done,” he reflects.
Sadly for Ben, the highs of the job would ultimately be outweighed by what are undeniably crushing, exhausting lows. His 2020 was marred by personal tragedies, losing both parents to unrelated illnesses in a short space of time. This came against the backdrop of the unfortunate realities that being a traffic cop can bring you face to face with.
“I was just dealing with fatal after fatal after fatal [accident], and one day I just ended up breaking. I had a breakdown at work, and I was told that my mental health was too fragile to see these things. I was medically retired from the police on 27 October 2020 – my son’s birthday.
“Because I sometimes have trouble getting words out due to my dyslexia, my therapist said ‘type some things down and try and read them back.’”
This was the beginning of the next chapter of Ben’s life. Those typed notes morphed into the first of two bestselling books, which spurred on a YouTube channel that now has over 80k subscribers.
He now spends his time travelling the country in aid of his charity, 1965 PTSD Awareness (the number a reference to his collar number as an officer). He speaks on mental health, and his experiences dealing with severe PTSD, depression and anxiety.
“It’s about getting people to talk about their feelings… when you’re in the police, it’s easy to think the world is 95% evil and 5% good. When you come out, you realise it’s 95% good… you realise that everybody struggles, everybody’s got issues, and a lot of people just find it very hard to talk to others. It’s just breaking down that barrier and saying ‘it’s okay to struggle.’”
As well as a mental health activist, Ben is also a proper car and bike enthusiast. His first car was an MG Metro Turbo, and he’s owned a string of hot hatches since then – Fiesta XR2s, Clio 16Vs and 172s, Civic Type Rs and now, a Mk8 Golf GTI. He’s also messed about on motorbikes since the age of three, a passion that continues to this day.
How did he balance out his clear love for fast cars and bikes with 19 years as a traffic officer, who are all too often painted as the heavy boot of authority preventing us from enjoying our machines?
“Everyone wants to drive fast, to ride fast. There’s a certain time and a place… there’s a difference between going 130 in a 30 limit and [finding] a backroad when it’s very quiet and opening it up a bit.
“If a person takes a decision to drive fast that’s their decision… all I’ll say is please be safe. It’s not just your life, it’s either someone else in the car or someone you could have a collision with. We’ve had to knock on that door and say ‘they’re not coming home’, and that’s very hard.”
Ben is returning to Caffeine&Machine: The Hill on Monday 6 November as our monthly ‘I Love You, Man’ guest. The talk is available to book now. All proceeds will go to Ben’s charity of choice, The Police Treatment Centres, with an additional donation from his fundraising group, 1965 PTSD Awareness.
