Just move along – Blitz forces dealers to tour streets
Published: 18 March 2010
by CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
POLICE claim they have dealers “on the backfoot” in Camden Town after launching a fresh drugs crackdown.
The New Journal joined a police operation on Friday night which saw two men arrested. Sergeant Roger Smith, from Camden Town and Primrose Hill Safer Neighbourhoods team, said dealers had changed their tactics after the clampdown. Where once they would stand in the same place all night, they were now forced into “doing circuits” of the main streets in an attempt to avoid detection.
Sgt Smith said: “There’s been a dramatic improvement since five years ago, when they seemed to be quite overtly dealing in large numbers. Now clearly they are on the backfoot.” Sergeant Nick Peters said that as police made it more difficult to sell drugs it had become “a lot harder for us to identify our targets”.
He added: “The idea is you make them work a lot harder to sell their £10 bag of weed and eventually they won’t come back.” During Friday’s operation, police used CCTV and plain-clothes officers to monitor suspects.