Agenda item

Report and Presentation by Inspector Alan Pitchford (Harm Reduction), Northumbria Police and Nicola Johnson, Community Safety Coordinator, Gateshead Council

The Committee received a report to provide an update on how partners tackle drug supply in Gateshead and across the Northumbria Police area.

The Committee were advised that the social and economic cost of drug use and supply to society is estimated to be around £10.7bn per year, of which £6bn is attributed to drug-related crime.

A number of key documents have been published over the last few years which has drugs as their key focus.  The National Drugs Strategy is about building recovery and getting into prevention and restriction of supply.

Gateshead have established the Central Drugs Alliance with Newcastle which is a partnership across the two local authorities, police, treatment services and supported accommodation providers.  The partnership looks at what is changing in terms of support and ensures a consistent approach to addressing drug supply across the Central area and is in line with the National Drug Strategy.  Its aim is to better link and share information across all drug partnership within the area.  The group has acted as a catalyst to bring the drugs agenda to the forefront of agencies work.  Four meetings have taken place to date where there have been intelligence gathering sessions looking at what’s happening with regards to supply on the ground. 

The plan is to extend this forum to make it Northumbria wide.

It has been identified that practitioners have access to a huge amount of intelligence linked to drug supply.  In a scoping exercise the alliance identified an inconsistent approach in terms of the sharing of the intelligence, it was either shared with police but with different officers based on relationships or not shared at all.  Some practitioners didn’t know what was useful to share and therefore didn’t.

A framework has been developed to make sure of a standardised approach to sharing information in Gateshead and some training has been rolled out to facilitate this.  All housing officers and some commissioned services have received a briefing from community safety and the intelligence department at the police about what information is useful to pass on and the appropriate routes to do this.  Further sessions are planned for supported accommodation providers, the DWP and GPs.  Sessions are also planned with Councillors in 2019.

The police have undertaken a number of operations under the umbrella of Operation Sentinel, there are also other means of information gathering which inform the operations:

·         Operation Sentinel – this is an umbrella operation with the main aim of disruption of serious and organised crime.  All of partners have been involved looking at a number of different ways of disrupting criminal gangs.

·         Intelligence Unit – there is a dedicated unit within Central command who process all of the intelligence which comes in.

·         Dedicated Source Unit – this is a specialist unit of highly trained officers who handle personal intelligence sources.  This information comes in as these people are closely associated with criminal gangs.

·         Covert Operations – this is a unit of highly trained people, they were responsible for Operation Falkland a couple of years ago which disrupted the flow of supply.

·         Execution of Warrants – there is a team who execute warrants which have been authorised.

·         Change in Focus on Possession – for a long time if a person was found to have drugs on them they would be criminalised.  If they are eligible for an out of court intervention given vulnerability they need to be protected, however, often it is not possible as they can be embedded in criminality.

·         Stop Search – was a bit of a political hot potato a couple of years ago, this is a key tool in disrupting the supply of drugs and where there are grounds to use it, it can be effective.

It was explained to the Committee how the police are able to get warrants, firstly lots of information needs to be gathered, from public, partners surveillance.  A warrant application is composed, authorisation is sought, an application is made to the courts.

Any information received is evaluated to make sure it is reliable and tested before an application is made to a court.

Whilst the police are not asking councillors or members of the public to be detectives, if they are to report information, it needs to be able to be used.  For example, details of times, car registration number, descriptions of people involved, if something is happening on a regular basis and how many times in the last however many months something has happened.

RESOLVED -               That the information contained within the report be noted.