What we will be doing with the drug users and the drinkers.

I have received a question in reply to my earlier post.

It is clear to all that we have an issue with the drug users and the drinkers. Until the launch of Operation Broad Oak we have struggled to cope with the increasing numbers of these people.

How we have dealt with them in the past is very limited. Being a drug user or a drinker is very low level in terms of crime measures very low on the scale and as such we have not had a huge amounts of options available to us.

So what I have done in the past is I currently have a program running on my police computer into which I add every name. Then I receive an alert telling me every time any of my subjects comes into contact with the Police. This means that I know every time one is reported for a crime, is wanted, or has been searched and so on. This allows me to have an understanding over who are the biggest problems and target them, also when some one is wanted I can locate them quickly and arrest them.

We also use a lot of searches and the information you provide us to target the drug dealers. This has been shown through out last year when we have arrested lots of dealers across the cluster and some real successes. The problem with that is that we are responsible for our own crimes, so if we arrest a drug dealer we need to hold that crime from arrest to sentencing. This is a huge drain on us as officers and takes us off the streets where we should be.

So what Operation Broad Oak is doing is using the Criminal Behaviour Order route. This is basically a 4 stage program. i will explain this.

First we have the community protection warning. This is just a warning, it states that you have engaged in anti-social behaviour and are now formally warned about that. Hopefully they take the warning seriously and do not repeat. 

If they actually ignore the warning, and are found to be acting in an Anti-Social Behaviour again then we go to the next stage. This is when they are issued a Community Protection Notice. With this they are issued with prohibitions such as not to sit with a paper cup, not to have an open can of alcohol or be with people they cause issues with. They are also then given a map of Acton Town Centre from which they are banned for a year. 

Hopefully that is the end of that, should they ignore the first two stage then they will be arrested and or sent to court to face charges of breaching their CPN. We are currently collecting evidence of these breaches and when they have collected four breaches we charge them for all send them to court. 

After that if they still act this way we will apply for Criminal Behaviour Orders. We have already successfully applied for 4 of these, and will continue to apply for these. These are basically court orders for the rules we set out in the CPN. The court is then the lead. We arrest for further breaches, and where the CPN is a £100 fine and night in jail, the courts will send offenders to prison for ignoring the court ordered CBOs.

So it is 

1 CPW- Community Protection Warnings. Just a form that says stop ASB

2 CPN - Community Protection Notice- Don't do A and B and stay out of the mapped area

3 Breach of CPN - arrest for court the next day £100 fine

4 CBO - Criminal Behaviour Order- Court ordered instructions to follow instructions laid out by police in their CPN

5 Arrest for breach of CBO - Prison

Hopefully this explains the plan.

We have issues a lot of CPWs already. We will also continue to investigate crimes, arrest wanted suspects and try and catch the drug dealers. This new operation simply says that the behaviour has reached a stage where we need to drastically change it and hopefully that is what we shall be doing during the next few months.

Then what we are using across London is this idea that we use the anti-social behaviour act to