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Silla Carron, above, from Clarence Way estate, with officers during a National Tackling Drugs Day event in Inverness Street last Wednesday |
Operation Oxen on drugs trail
Our reporter spends a night with patrol which checks estates as tenants sleep
BIN rooms, stairwells, fire escapes and passage-ways – the blind alleys and nooks of Camden’s housing estates sometimes offer refuge to the desperate but also shelter to the lawless.
Tenants who wake up to the after-effects – discarded needles, crack-pipes, condoms and cans – can grow as frustrated as the housing staff whose unpleasant job it is to clear up the mess.
But being places of the night, the only time that the authorities can act to prevent the detritus is while residents sleep – a job normally unseen, but observed last week by the New Journal, which accompanied police and council staff on a sweep of 10 estates between midnight and dawn.
Picking through the deserted corridors of estates in Somers Town, St Pancras and Regent’s Park, the team of housing staff, community safety experts and community police found no rough sleepers, drug addicts or users. But they did see evidence of their passing.
In the dank underground basement of the Curnock Street estate in Camden Town, garage doors had been smashed at intervals along the reeking passage, and nests of newspapers, cans and discarded clothing concealed the needles and emptied drug packaging of addicts.
Littered among the tumble of cardboard and newspaper were empty wraps used to hold crack cocaine and the remains of needles used to inject heroin.
Leaving the dimly-lit complex of garages beneath the 12-block, 280-flat estate in Plender Street, PC Jan Henry from the Safer Neighbourhoods Team pledged a “blitz on Curnock Street” to drive out anti-social behaviour.
Curnock Street stood out from the team’s early-hours tour of Buckleberry, Ambleside, Waterhead, Tarns, Three Field, Mornington Court, Mornington Street, Bayham Place, Camden Street and Ampthill Square estates – dubbed Operation Oxen by planners – where no more than traces of drug use were found.
The council’s community safety team supervisor Julian Coutts said the clean sweep across the majority of estates demonstrated a massive improvement over the past four years following the use of Asbos, acceptable behaviour agreements, injunctions and security improvements on the estates.
He said: “The fact that we have found no one is in many ways a good sign. There are places that even six months ago were being used in ways that made residents’ lives a misery.”
He acknowledged, however, that the Curnock Street estate remained a problem: “When we started working with the police and consulting on the issue of Asbos we realised that criminality associated with this sort of anti-social behaviour is really high.
“It is not violent – people have a conception about drug-users, but they don’t have violence issues any more than the rest of society – but it is petty criminality, pick-pocketing and shoplifting in Camden High Street.”
Housing office patch manager Dawn Aldred, also on the 2am to 6am patrol, said efforts would be made to secure recently-installed gates preventing access to the estate’s basement.
‘Fantasy to think you can drive out drugs’
ERADICATING drugs in Camden Town is a “fantasy” and the council and police should abandon hard-line enforcement tactics in favour of a softer approach, the director of an international human rights campaign said last week,
As the council leader lent his blessing to a National Tackling Drugs Day exhibition by police and council staff in Inverness Street last Wednesday, Sebastian Saville, director of Camden High Street-based drugs and human rights organisation Release, said: “All you see here is a message about ‘tackling’ drugs, but the idea that drugs are going to go away is fantasy at any level.
“Many experts in the field feel this (Inverness Street) would be an ideal place for a drugs consumption room – it would be better for the drug users and it would clean up the community. What we have here is a moral knee-jerk reaction.”
Mr Saville spoke as police and council drug agencies set up stalls along Inverness Street to hammer home the message that Camden Town was being targeted as a central plank of the council’s battle against drugs. Council leader Councillor Keith Moffit said the area had improved dramatically in recent times because of his administration’s investment in anti-drug measures, while Silla Carron, a tenants’ leader on nearby Clarence Way estate, said: “There’s been a huge change in the past year. When (users) buy from here they want somewhere to take it and that’s when we used to see problems on our estate. Now there are less. If you clean up where you live and get a bit of pride in it, it makes a real difference.” |
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