CABRAMATTA DEALERS REGROUP AFTER OPERATION PUCCINI SUCCESS

Constable Rachel Dowd swerves her car into the driveway of a
Cabramatta block of units, a new haunt of drug addicts 500 metres from
the central business district.

Two men are about to shoot up heroin in the car park but as Constable
Dowd and her off-sider, Constable Peter Curran, give chase on foot,
the addicts bolt and throw away the balloon filled with heroin.

A search fails to find the balloon, so the men are charged with
trespass and the officers add the ditched drugs to their list of daily
frustrations.

Cabramatta's intense street-level police blitz, Operation Puccini, has
just finished its second year with strong results in crime reduction,
but a new problem has emerged.

The dealers are moving out of the business centre into apartments in a
one-kilometre radius from the shops. Here they fortify themselves
behind steel doors and place lookouts outside, denying police the
element of surprise and any chance of smashing open the door.

"By the time you get inside they have flushed the drugs down the
toilet," Constable Dowd said.

The modus operandi is that addicts get off the train, make a call from
a public phone box, zip across to a block of units, buy heroin, and
inject it in car parks that are so littered with used syringes that
neighbours complain daily to police.

Puccini's latest results, to be released today, show that in two years
there has been a 27 per cent reduction in crime and 5,800 people have
been charged with 8,800 offences. More than 300 dealers have been
nabbed for supplying heroin, 1,676 people with possessing the drug,
and 2,007 drug exhibits seized. Drug-related offences such as robbery
(often involving injury) are down 20 per cent, stealings by 28 per
cent and stolen vehicles by 40 per cent. Drug detection has increased
by 44 per cent.

But officers on the beat complain that excessive paperwork - in
particular, for permission for controlled operations to buy drugs to
gain evidence - results in long delays, and by the time authority is
received the dealers have moved.

Cabramatta's Local Area Commander, Superintendent Peter Horton, said
Puccini had achieved its objective to make the CBD safer through
police on foot patrols, transit police on trains, and closed circuit
cameras in drug hot spots.

"But in doing so, it has moved the suppliers out of the CBD," he said.
"The users have to go looking harder for their drugs, which makes it
easier for us to target the dealers."

Most of the dealers are young Asian men and women; most users are
Caucasians who come from as far away as Darwin for heroin that sells
for $20 to $30 a cap, he said.

The police use "move on" and search powers to discourage drug
loiterers but some are brazen enough to inject in the park across from
the police station.

One 17-year-old stopped for an identification check at the railway
station has track marks from injecting heroin stretching from his
elbow to his wrist. "You need to see a doctor," Constable Dowd says.
"This is a move-on order, you have no lawful reason to be here."

Another juvenile - a 15-year-old who has clocked up 19 charges - tells
the officers he was in a detoxification program for four days last
week but yesterday he was shooting up. "I cried myself to sleep when I
was detoxing, but I couldn't get off it."

Constable Dowd says: "Every single addict you talk to wants to get off
it and some of them you really feel for. We're not inhumane, but I
haven't met one addict who has kicked it."