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STREET DEALS CRACKDOWN
Police reveal covert operation to end open drugs market ‘hell’
AN open crack-cocaine market that has made residents’ lives “hell” has been targeted by a covert police operation to tackle dealers, the West End Extra can reveal.
Detectives arrested a 19-year-old man on Wednesday and expect more to follow after weeks of painstaking observation of the streets around St Giles church and Centrepoint.
The teenager was charged with seven counts of supplying class A drugs yesterday.
Residents and businesses have become frustrated by the open dealing in the Tottenham Court Road area, according to Jo Weir, chairwoman of the Covent Garden Community Association.
She said: “The dealing makes life hell for people around New Compton Street and it affects people in Neal Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. A lot of our compassion is eroded because of the abuse of our open spaces and our family life.”
For several months, plain-clothes police have staked out the leafy gardens of St Giles churchyard, long a refuge for heroin and crack dealers and their desperate clients and a byword among residents for seediness and intimidation.
In covert footage seen by the Extra, police recorded queues of drug-users scoring their fixes as shoppers and residents walked past. Many buyers openly smoked cocaine from stumpy crack pipes in the scant cover of the church porch or the garden’s wheelie-bins.
Other tapes showed addicts growing agitated in the nooks and passageways around Tottenham Court Road until dealers arrived to dispense both ‘white’- crack cocaine- and ‘brown‘, heroin- often passing the wraps of powder from mouth to mouth.
The officer in charge of the bust, Detective Sergeant Sean Tuckey of Camden Police, acknowledged that residents may have grown frustrated while his team gathered enough evidence to overrcome the challenge of proving ‘supply’ rather than possession of drugs.
He said: “It can take several weeks to secure the evidence that we believe will get a conviction. But this operation came about because of complaints to the Safer Neighbourhood teams by the community in St Giles and the surrounding area- and it is still ongoing and more arrests are anticipated in the coming weeks.” He added that the council and the Holborn and Covent Garden safer neighbourhood police team would continue cooperating to try to stop new dealers moving in.
Ms Weir said: “Well done to the police for this, although of course you can’t expect more than a dispersement or a disruption, because there is so much money in it that new dealers can move in.”
She called for the opening of a police ‘sub-station’ in St Giles as a possible permanent solution. |
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