On a dreary March day last week, David Charie left his house to attend a model railway meeting. His wife was also out. On his return, Charie noticed he had an email from one of his neighbours who lived further down the road, alerting him to a group of young people smoking a crack pipe in his doorway.
“It’s not uncommon,” said Mr Charie. “Whilst this is the first time drug use has happened in my porch, drug dealing is everywhere. How much of it you see depends on what time you happen to be around. I usually witness it two or three times a day.”
Mr Charie lives in north London, in an area renowned as one of Islington’s hotspots for drug dealing. According to statistics released by Islington’s Policy & Performance Scrutiny Crime update, there were 1,346 drug offences recorded between 2017 and 2018. Whilst this is a 16 per cent decrease from the previous year, which saw a total of 1,561 drug offences in Islington, it is an issue that remains at the forefront of residents’ minds. In Finsbury Park alone, there were 176 drug-related offences between January and December 2018.
Incidents such as Mr Charie’s are not isolated. A mother of a young toddler described the moment when she was “rushing around with her pushchair” when she witnessed a deal outside Archway Station in broad daylight.
“I was really shocked and disgusted,” she said. “I had my two-year-old with me, and it’s not the sort of thing I want him to see.”
Several residents from the Finsbury Park area have described witnessing deals around Regina Road, Stroud Green Road, and Albert Road all in the space of two weeks. One resident, who is a mother of two young children, says the problem is so bad she has “almost got used to it.
“It’s something that really concerns me,” she said. “It is worrying to think the streets are no longer a safe place.”
Despite the issue being raised in November at Islington’s Policy and Performance scrutiny committee, residents are growing frustrated that little is being done to tackle the problem. Clare Jeapes, Labour Councillor for Canonbury, was one of the people who spoke at the meeting.
“I walked through my local park and there was someone sitting there smoking a crack pipe out in the open. There was a group of parents nearby who had really young children, and they were going to walk within inches of this person.
“I wasn’t going to approach the person, because they might have gotten violent. I did report it, but I am concerned that there appears to be more drug activity going on.”
There’s one question on everyone’s lips: why aren’t the police doing anything?
The answer isn’t clear-cut. In the November meeting, police said they had acknowledged “an increase in prevalence and complaints re drug dealing and concern re a possible escalation in gang tensions/violence.” Yet Peter Kirkham, a Former Senior Met officer, says that it is impossible for the police to monitor Islington’s “explosion” of drug dealing until there are more police on the streets.
“It is blatant now – dealers notice that there are no police on the streets and they’re not getting hit by local proactive operations as there is nobody to do them,” said Officer Kirkham. “There’s a hell of a lot of money to be made in drug dealing. It’s a very attractive proposition for anybody that has not got many life options. To combat this, the solution has to be more police on the ground.”
For Kirkham, the links between drug dealing and violent crimes is not optional, but a “necessity.”
“What we’re seeing now is extreme violence exploding over absolute trivia. More and more people getting involved and trying to nick the business off somebody else. Islington is particularly bad because of the levels of violence that are being seen around the estates. It is all one way or the other directly linked to drug dealing.”
Yet Mr Charie, who has lived in Islington his whole life, maintains the residents in north London refuse to be frightened by the activity.
“I wouldn’t say it’s making people feel more unsafe. Most of them are pretty pathetic characters. The problem is when drug dealing leads to other crimes such as stealing. If you’ve got a habit, you’ve got to fund it.”
Whilst the number of drug offences reported has decreased since 2017, Metropolitan police statistics show a 20 per cent increase in serious youth violence in 2018 and a 73 per cent increase in robbery offences. Many worry that allowing street drug dealing to go unnoticed simply fuels the fire for more dangerous crimes.
There is a darker criminal underworld to Islington’s drug dealing trade, and it is the borough’s young people who are at risk. Just last week, an article in the Observer exposed the county lines networks operating in Finsbury Park feeding Northern towns, including Kings Lynn in Norfolk.
County Lines dealing operates by established criminal networks recruiting young, often vulnerable, people to filter drugs from cities and towns to rural areas across the transport network. According to a police assessment, there are 27 county lines operating into Norfolk, mostly from London.
A bus stop near City and Islington College was cited in the article as being a ‘pre-eminent location’ for county line dealers to operate. Yet Andy Forbes, Principal of City and Islington College, said he was “disappointed” to see Islington covered in the media in such a negative light.
“We do a tremendous amount of work during the academic year with all our students educating them about the dangers of misusing drugs and ensuring that they are very clear about the law on drug use,” said Mr Forbes.
Many of the parents whose children have been exploited by drug-dealing rings around Finsbury Park were of Somali heritage.
For Abdikadir Ahmed, a youth worker at the Somali Youth Development Resource Centre, the Somali population has been one of the groups hardest hit by police cuts due to the risk they now face of racial profiling. For Mr Ahmed, if young Somalis are “constantly treated like a drug dealer” by the police, they “start to believe it themselves.” It’s a problematic cycle.
“Young Somali men will be three times more likely to be stopped and searched than other young people,” he said. “There was one instance where a young person was stopped three times within ten minutes.”
“We know police are trying to do the best they can do. But because of cuts, it becomes more difficult. It’s easy to profile people who look a certain way.”
The State of Equalities in Islington 2018 Report estimates there are around 2,500 people of Somali origin living in Islington.
Situations such as the one outlined by Ahmed make it difficult to pinpoint a direct solution to Islington’s drug-dealing crisis. For many of the borough’s residents, legislation of ‘softer’ drugs, such as marijuana, is the way forward.
Yet for others, this simply perpetuates the problem. If drugs are more accessible, users will continue to buy them. And when there’s demand, there’s supply, meaning young people will keep being exploited through drug-dealing networks.
One Stroud Green resident, who was a former long-time hard drug user and wishes to remain anonymous, described how he has “totally changed his mind” on legalization over the past five years.
“If drugs are easy to get – and they are – people will use. I did. It almost ruined my life, and making it easier for people is just folly,” he said.
He maintains that drugs are still too easy to come by in Islington, leaving many ex-users to battle with their demons on a daily basis.
“I can send a text now and get a bag dropped off in 20 minutes.”
“The lack of police on the street gives dealers a sense of security. If I wanted something harder it might take a few hours to hook up with someone but it’s not difficult.”
Yet for others, putting more police on the streets simply tackles the symptom, not the cause.
Sadiq Yusuf, Project Manager of Jubba Youth Community Organisation in Angel, thinks more should be done to combat the preconceptions people have about young people who are lured into drug-dealing rings.
“A lot of these kids are being wrongly portrayed,” he said. “They have good qualifications, they’ve done well in school – it’s just the low self-esteem that’s got to them. They need that push – they are getting it from us.”
Schemes such as weekly football clubs on the Andover Estate, employability workshops and ‘Fifa and Chill’ evenings have been hugely successful in giving young people a focus that keeps them occupied and off the streets.
“A lot of young people have come up to me, and said that the message being put out is wrong – ‘this isn’t us.’ It’s not just Islington or Somalis – this issue is national and affecting every community.”
Yet for people like Mr Charie, the deals on their doorsteps continue to persist.
