Teenage gang get early wake-up call
Cash and cannabis seized as Tribune witnesses police operation involving 50 officers
Published: 22 October, 2010
by TERRY MESSENGER
AT 6.30am on on a cold, damp morning around 50 police officers crowded into an operations room at their Highbury Vale base to prepare for a series of raids on a gang of suspected drug dealers.
Inspector Mike Cowie, leading the operation, said the teenagers styled themselves as overlords of a council estate in the borough.
“They are disrupting the community and we’re going to put out a message that we’re not going to put up with it any more,” he told his team.
They started off “in low level anti-social activity” when they were younger but have “progressed up the scale,” said Inspector Cowie.
The Tribune was invited to witness a raid on a member of the gang, one of several due for the knock.
At around 7.30am, four officers, wearing helmets and protective armour, smashed down the door of a low-rise council flat using a high tech battering ram and yelling “police, police” as they charged in.
They found a sullen 16-year-old and his two young sisters in the clean and tidy but sparsely furnished flat.
Around 15 other officers followed them inside and conducted an intensive two-hour search of the flat for evidence of drug dealing and other gang-related activity.
Their teenager sat impassively, offering no resistance, as a crowd of police officers using sniffer dogs rifled through his home, promising to put everything back, including the battered door.
One officer told the Tribune: “It may look heavy-handed but if only one officer came on these raids, there would be a much greater chance of resistance and therefore injury. This way, no one gets hurt.”
Shortly after the raid began, the gang member’s mother returned home after working a 12-hour night shift.
Wide-eyed and dismayed, she gazed at her battered front door and exclaimed: “What’s going on?”
From the balcony outside the flat, where the Tribune was asked to stand once the search began, there could be heard a furious mother telling off her son.
Eventually, a leading raid team member emerged from the flat announcing: “We’ve found a small quantity of cannabis in a coat pocket and £1,000 in cash in a shoe.”
The teenager was arrested on suspicion of possession of class B drugs and money laundering and bailed to return to Islington Police Station on December 1.
“We’re hoping it might open up more lines of inquiry,” explained one of the officers.
Joining the raid was a member of Islington Police’s Youth Engagement Team (YET) who had been trying for some time to steer the teenager away from crime. He’d been encouraging him to use his gifts as a talented sportsman to pursue a legitimate career.
He explained that the raid was an exercise in “disruption and intervention” – a mixture of hard and soft policing.
“We need to try to get him back on track and we won’t stop this aspect of the work even if he ends up in prison,” he said.
As the teenager was led away, hands cuffed behind his backand staring impassively ahead, the friendly youth engagement officer remarked: “It’s going to be a difficult one.”