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David Gleeson outside Charing Cross police station |
A night with the cops will show what life’s like on the street
We all know that Soho has a criminal downside, but only after a night on the streets can you appreciate the challenges facing our police, writes David Gleeson
HAVING lived in Soho for 14 years, I thought I pretty much had the measure of my neighbourhood.
Until last Saturday night, when I finally collected a prize from this year’s Soho Festival raffle. The Soho Safer Neighbourhoods Team (SNT), a division of Central Westminster Police, had donated the chance for two people to spend a shift with them.
My partner and I thought it might be a novel way to experience a different side of Soho, and picked the Saturday night shift as we assumed it would be the most exciting.
We usually prefer quiet Saturday nights at home, so we little realised just how much of Soho’s “exciting different side” we were about to see.
Presenting ourselves at the SNT office at 9pm, we were met by Sergeant Niall McParland, who started telling us about the Soho we didn’t know.
While we’re well aware that the downside of the West End pleasure park is “illegal activity”, we were amazed by the sheer size of the neighbourhood statistics.
Every day about one million people pass along Oxford Street and half of that number enter Soho. Such an intensely busy area naturally generates its own crime wave, but here it’s a tsunami: in April of last year, the sheer number of pickpocketing offences alone accounted for 5 per cent of all reported crime in the entire country.
The good news is that, in terms of detection rates, the Soho police team are the best performing in Westminster.
Daytime and night-time Soho are very different places.
As the working day becomes the drinking evening, things hot up, and – as far as the police are concerned – Soho is buzzing by 10pm.
Predictably, Thursday to Saturday nights is their busiest time and the calls they respond to differ by area. For example, Leicester Square attracts a lot of teenagers, which tends to make it a more violent environment than Soho, where the gay village has had a calming effect.
The main thing keeping the police busy in Soho last Saturday night was the drugs trade, with crack cocaine looking like the biggest seller.
As it comes up to 10pm, Sgt McParland suggests we – himself and four colleagues, plus us lucky prizewinners – go out in the van to look around. As soon as we climb inside, a message comes through loud and clear that two drug dealers have been spotted in Dean Street, and the van picks up speed, sirens blaring.
We dash through Compton Street at an unreal speed, turning into Dean Street and hurtling to a sudden stop at the corner of Meard Street right alongside the suspects.
While I’m amazed by our sergeant’s skilful driving, I’m glad we’ve stopped and I can collect my nerves as the team coolly jump out and confront the two suspected dealers and their customer, smoothly separating and questioning them.
One of the team reappears in the van and shows us a small spirit bottle that has been turned into a simple crack pipe – empty drink cans are also easy to use, we’re told – and then the two suspects are brought inside and everyone is off to Charing Cross police station.
The guys are searched, released and, within the hour, are back on Dean Street as we answer another call. This time three suspects are driven to the station: two are charged and the third, a young woman, is “clean” and allowed to leave.
Street cameras follow her as she goes straight back to her hidden drugs.
And so it goes on. More expert racing through Soho after being tipped off by camera monitors, and more dealers arrested and taken to Charing Cross.
Sgt McParland’s practised eye spots a user quietly smoking crack, alone in D’Arblay Street, as we head towards another call.
We leave after 1am, very tired and dismayed by the size of the hitherto hidden drug market right under our unsuspecting noses, and full of admiration for the professional thoroughness and balanced calm of the SNT.
This formidable division’s impressive training and expertise lend each well-executed swoop an air of military precision, which makes me feel a lot safer in my neighbourhood.
But first-hand experience of the sheer scale of what the police in Soho are expected to control shocked us both.
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