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Jeremy Burton |
Hundreds more drug ‘slaps on wrists’
Warnings for possession of cannabis as new police management team takes a harder line
THE rate at which Camden police hand out warnings for cannabis and tickets for rowdiness – dismissed as a “slap on the wrist” by previous senior officers only a year ago – has more than doubled.
New management in the borough’s force have ordered a massive increase in the use of formal cannabis warnings to people found in possession of the drug on the streets.
From a previous annual average of around 600 cannabis warnings, Camden looks set to issue around 1,500 this year.
Detective Superintendent Jeremy Burton said: “It is an effective way of dealing with an issue, and an effective way of reassuring businesses, the community and Camden that we are policing effectively. If I ring up police and say there are people smoking cannabis in my street, I expect someone to do something about it because the law is being broken.”
Former borough commander Mark Heath, who was replaced in January, had insisted formal cannabis warnings were rarely appropriate for Camden’s deeply ingrained dope culture, and called instead for fines or arrests.
“I want to improve sanctioned detections at the quality end of the business,” he said in an interview last March. “You could do it by handing out cannabis warnings. (But) with some of these people who you see day in, day out in Camden Town, do you think they are going to take any notice of a warning? Is that going to change their behaviour? It is a slap on the wrist.”
Camden police are required to “solve” at least 24 per cent of offences.
Under current measurements, solving a complicated rape case involving dozens of officers and hundreds of hours of work is given the same statistical weight as awarding a caution, or a formal cannabis warning.
Minutes of police management meetings in June last year show that, faced with a rate of just 17 per cent, department heads were ordered “to push productivity through response team, tasking team and specials for deployment over the weekend to assist SD [sanction detection] rate in relation to formal warnings for possession of cannabis.”
In bold, a note read: “50 formal warnings for possession of cannabis per week, which would be a proportionate number, would provide around a quarter of our SD target.”
Camden’s sanctioned detection rate is now above 22 per cent and may reach the 24 per cent target when the year’s figures are fully tallied.
DS Burton said: “We are still third or fourth in the Met at about a 50 per cent charge rate – the quality hasn’t changed.”
Camden’s figures for the year 2008/09 show a marked improvement on 2007/08 in terms of reducing burglaries, car crime, robberies and violence.
Where the borough badly missed its targets last year – with an increase of robberies by 25 per cent and burglaries by 10 per cent drawing unwanted attention from the Met’s top brass – its “traffic light” report card this year is predominately green, rather than red. |
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