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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: 'Police doing social experiments - that worries me'
Detective Sergeant Steve Holme, Derbyshire Drug Squad The Guardian
Tuesday 08 Oct 2002 We've got a Portakabin up here with four people analysing the drug markets. Next to it we've got the biggest Portakabin you can imagine with 40 people looking after the speed cameras in Derbyshire. I'm not sure what that says about priorities, though at least Derbyshire police have kept a drug squad - many other forces haven't. Some people say, The drugs laws aren't working, so let's legalise it. But all drugs WERE legal: heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis - they were only made illegal because they were causing problems. We're still a law abiding country and if something is illegal the vast majority of people won't touch it. Even if you sold crack cocaine at corner shops, there would still be a black market - alcohol and tobacco show that: age restrictions at the corner shop it doesn't stop kids getting it somewhere else. People say, Give these addicts free heroin so they won't break into houses and shops. I'm not sure the links between drugs and crime are that straightforward. The latest experiments with urine testing show that 39% of people arrested for certain crimes are testing positive for heroin or cocaine. That means that 61% aren't. Look at the history of some of these burglars, they were burgling or breaking into cars before they were drug users. Everyone wants a bogeyman, policemen included: "All these horrible drug users are committing all this crime." Crime is often committed by criminals. Even so, I have some sympathy with the free-heroin argument because the best we can offer heroin users at the moment is: come off it and we'll get you addicted to methadone, which causes more deaths than heroin. The methadone programme doesn't work and if we're going to give them a drug why not give them heroin? If cannabis is genuinely less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes - and I've read thousands of documents that say it's more dangerous - why not legalise it instead of going halfway and [as planned by the government next year] reclassifying it as a class C drug , meaning it's still an offence to possess it but you can't be arrested for it. If cannabis gets made class C, then if I'm a heroin dealer in Derby I'll keep my heroin very well concealed in my trousers and I'll have a bit of cannabis in my pocket. So if I'm acting suspiciously and a uniformed policeman stops me, I'll say, Oh it's because I got this bit of cannabis on me, mate. How does the policeman decide whether to accept it's just for personal use, or take him in for a proper drugs search? It's just confusing. The Misuse of Drugs Act is a law that's 30-odd years old and it needs simplifying. I think all anyone's looking for - users, dealers, public and police - is clear, understandable drugs laws. Reclassification is not going to get to the nitty-gritty. What you need is a list of drugs that are illegal unless you get them off the doctor, and that's that. If you look at enforcing class C under the Misuse of Drugs Act, it's got loads of different schedules. So for instance some drugs are called class C drugs but it's not illegal to possess them in the form of "a medicinal product". You would not believe the way lawyers can twist and turn and argue for hours about those words. How do you enforce that law if it interprets a medicinal product as anything in the form of a tablet or ampule? Medicinal product should be defined as such if you get it prescribed by your doctor. Instead of saying it's OK to buy steroids from a backstreet dealer that are marked "For animal use only" because it's in an ampule. We shouldn't be having these arguments. It should be clear for everybody so they know the risks and what's going to happen if you're arrested. I also feel sorry for juries because they don't get all the evidence in a case. Hours are spent before each trial deciding what a jury can hear so that we're not being unfair to the defendant. We take an oath saying we will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and then aren't allowed to do that. Take a trial of a drug dealer arrested with a kilo of amphetamine on him. We say he's supplying it; he says it's for personal use to keep his weight down. A jury might ask: did the police do a drug or urine test to see if this man used amphetamine? Now, we can't do that, we haven't got the legal power. But if the prosecuting barrister and the judge agree that all the jury will be told is, No, then the jury are obviously going to go away thinking the police haven't done their job. And they'll quite possibly find him not guilty. Why can't they be told why the test hasn't been done? You can understand why juries come away from court bemused. But one of the good changes recently is that witnesses and victims are looked after a bit better in court - that's long overdue. It's a big experience for a normal person. In police work, the biggest change and the best thing that ever happened was tape recorded interviews. Much more straightforward. The change that's needed now is that we video every interview and the jury watch it. As it is, they don't get a full transcript, but no transcript gives you body language, tone of voice. You get someone leaning back, not bothered, arrogant saying, "No comment", juries need to see that. Why not just play the tape? But I'm not a great fan of police officers getting involved in debates over whether laws should be changed. Having some say is all right, but not a great say. Thirty years ago police officers never got publicly involved in politics and discussing the law. Now we've got more politicised senior officers who have their say on a lot of things. And it worries me that police officers are doing social experiments. What right have we got to do that? To say, "Because I'm the inspector in this town, this bit of law will be enforced and that bit of law won't because that's now I feel; and then we'll see what happens" - that's completely wrong. It's not our job, not what we're paid to do. We should just be out there enforcing the law, which is what the public want us to do. I just wish that in the last 15 years as drug use has risen more police officers had confronted drug dealers. There's about 2,000 officers in Derbyshire and if we came up with three drugs arrests a year per officer instead of one, that would give another 4,000 arrests. And this isn't just a local thing: if every force did the same it would make a massive difference. As well as showing the public that we are doing something. At the moment, the vast majority of officers may never have stopped or arrested a drug dealer. I know how difficult it is: people carry it in their mouth, they carry it stuffed up their bottom. But we shouldn't just do the easy things - though I worry about the training and whether we're giving new officers to the tools to go out on the street with confidence and do it right. (When I joined it was a bit like those films about the army. Now it's a lot more: pull up a beanbag and let's discuss this topic, what's your view of it? What we've just done in Derby is a scheme bringing in all the trainee bobbies to retrain them in practical things with experienced officers.) People don't always know the drug squads are making arrests; we're not supposed to be seen. But we're going to more meetings now and telling people what we're doing. When we did 83 arrests in a week in the Chesterfield area, we went out at 8 o'clock in the morning with uniformed officers in as many marked vans as we could, so people saw we were doing something. That Chesterfield operation was part of this drug-market mapping project I've been running for 18 months in Derbyshire. It's really multi-agency working at its peak, quite innovative. What we try to do is create a drugs drought in an area - have a big operation, make a lot of arrests - which forces people into treatment. We keep other agencies informed all the way through; It's quite strange for the police to trust other people with that sort of operational information. On the day we arrest the dealers, we get treatment workers and people like that into the area right away, try to get drug users into treatment, try to help communities fight back. Early indications are that we can do it in small towns and rural areas. To shut a large town down is much more difficult. In an area the size of Chesterfield it hasn't worked so well. But that's why it's a three-year project; we'll learn from each time we do it. When I was first on the drugs squad [in 1986], the ethos was that you couldn't force somebody into treatment, but in the last five years or so there's been a complete change of thinking on that. Now drug treatment and testing orders force people: the court says you will have some treatment mate or you're going to prison if you don't stick to it. My boss devised a scheme called "deferred cautioning" where first-time offenders are offered the chance of not having a caution on their record if they agree to speak to a treatment worker. Of course there's also drugs inside the police. A lot of forces don't know what to do with officers who use them. I think it's fairly straightforward: the police are there to uphold the law not break it, if they commit a criminal offence they should be sacked. If I'm a burglary victim and somebody comes along to investigate my case who's got a cocaine problem, it's not going to be investigated right is it? But lots of forces are twisting themselves in knots not to sack anybody, frightened to death of industrial tribunals. - Steve Holme began as a cadet in 1969, joining the police proper in 1972. Since 1977 all his work has been in the CID or drug squads
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