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Cllr Ben Rawlings |
Back-up on way for
drugs blitz
A TWO-year drive against drugs in Camden Town will see new police support officers – paid for by the Town Hall – patrolling Camden High Street.
Camden Council community safety chiefs have pledged to spend £300,000 hiring 18 police community support officers within months. Camden police will provide an additional 10 officers for the drugs blitz. Councillors have described the “aggressive, visible drugs market” as a blight on the “Camden Town experience”.
The council’s Tory deputy leader Councillor Andrew Marshall believes plans to redesign Camden Town Tube station and a £100,000 facelift for Camden High Street will create a scene where “drug dealing, especially visible drug dealing, is dramatically reduced”.
Lib Dem councillor Ben Rawlings, Camden’s community safety chief, said on Tuesday: “Camden Town clearly needs a bigger police presence. Although we’ve lobbied for more officers, the Met doesn’t give Camden Town the priority or resources it deserves as a major drugs market.” He claimed the previous Labour administration tackled the problem by tossing Asbos “into a black hole”. This had not dented the drugs market.
Cllr Rawlings acknowledged that Camden residents will be paying twice for policing, through council tax as well as through the annual fee paid to City Hall, which funds the Met, but said: “We’re not just going to sit on our hands just because the Met won’t act.”
Councillor Roger Robinson, Labour’s community safety spokesman, said: “We’ve been trying for many years to get more police in Camden Town, but regular, properly trained officers. Community officers, with all respect to the job they do, don’t have the training or experience or powers of regular police.”
The main target of the campaign is ‘skunk’’, the extra-strength form of cannabis associated with forms of mental illness including schizophrenia.
The measures are part of the Lib Dem-Conservative administration’s budget proposals, due to be debated on February 28.
Welcoming the Town Hall initiative, Chief Superintendent Mark Heath, Camden’s police chief, said: “For this investment to truly pay off there needs to be a much wider responsibility to actually change the reasons why Camden Town has been like this for so long.”
In a random survey on Tuesday night, a New Journal reporter was approached four times by men offering ‘skunk’ or hash between Camden Town Tube station and Camden Lock. One man in his 20s calling himself Ali said he could arrange to supply class A drugs if required. “This has been going on for ever and it will keep going on. Here and Inverness Street has been hot but there are so many people coming here to buy. This is Camden,” he said. |
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