DRUGS BUST-UP AT THE MET

Senior Officers Are At Loggerheads, Should They Pursue Users Or Switch To
Softly-Softly?

Brian Paddick, the progressive head of Lambeth police, knew he was in
trouble when he was called to a meeting at Scotland Yard at half past seven
last Wednesday morning. The commander of one of the most testing boroughs
in the capital had been summoned to see Assistant Commissioner Mike Todd,
the tough-talking head of the Metropolitan Police's street policing
operations and told to explain the extraordinary comments he had made in
the House of Commons the previous day. Paddick had told the Home Affairs
Select Committee inquiry into drugs that he did not see the recreational
weekend use of cannabis or even cocaine and ecstasy as a priority for his
force, and argued that police time was better spent catching serious
criminals further up the narcotics chain.

Paddick had already caused considerable controversy for introducing a
'softly-softly' approach to cannabis possession in his borough by issuing
cautions rather than arresting people when they were caught with small
amounts of the drug.

'My view is that there are a whole range of people who buy drugs (not just
cannabis, but cocaine and ecstasy) with money they have earned
legitimately,' he told the inquiry. 'They use a small amount of this drug,
a lot of them just at weekends. It has no adverse effect on the rest of the
people that they are with. They go back to work on Monday morning and are
unaffected for the rest of the week.'

His words were careful and considered and marked a sea change in police
policy towards drugs. The only problem was that Paddick did not have the
authority to announce the change in policy.

The meeting with Todd was a clash of police cultures. Paddick,
Oxford-educated and the most senior openly gay officer in the force,
represents a new breed of fast-track senior officers, hungry for reform and
open to radical ideas. Todd is a more traditional coppers' copper with a
taste in old-fashioned street policing, who wears his first-class degree
from Essex University lightly. He was, for example, in charge of the
controversial strategy of rounding up demonstrators on Oxford Street during
this year's May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations.

Todd was furious. He told Paddick that, although he accepted that the
junior officer was speaking in a personal capacity, his words were in
direct contradiction to the official line of the Metropolitan Police
Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, who had just announced a crackdown on
middle-class cocaine users in the clubs and bars of London's West End.

In a morning that Brian Paddick is likely to remember for some time, he was
then taken to receive a second carpeting from Stevens himself, who pointed
out that his job was to uphold Metropolitan Police policy, a position he
was forced to accept, although he has subsequently told friends that the
meeting with Stevens ended with the Commissioner telling him to 'keep up
the good work' in Lambeth.

Scotland Yard then took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement
officially distancing itself from Paddick's remarks.

One source at the Association of Chief Police Officers said Brian Paddick
had been 'naive' to think that his comments would go unnoticed by the media
and unchecked by his superiors. 'Throughout the police service there are
differences of opinion and ambiguities. This was a personal opinion based
on his professional experience and he may have thought that was fine. But
the Commissioner was never likely to see it that way.'

Brian Paddick's comments have uncovered deep police divisions over the
drugs issue which senior officers are keen to play down. But by the end of
last week Sir John Stevens had been forced to reprimand a second senior
officer - this time for going public with his criticism of Commander
Paddick. In a letter to the Evening Standard Chief Superintendent Simon
Humphrey, head of the Yard's Vice Squad, wrote: 'I wish to disassociate
myself and my officers from the widely publicised comments of Commander
Brian Paddick... he should be reminded that first and foremost Class A
drugs kill.'

Humphrey's approach is backed by the Police Federation, the union for beat
officers whose members are said to be angry over Paddick's outspoken
approach: 'If he wanted to have that conversation, he should have done it
privately,' said Glen Smythe, Chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation.
'Ecstasy is unpredictable and kills without warning. Try justifying that to
a parent whose child has died. If Commander Paddick does not have enough
officers to deal with his priorities, he should just say so and lobby for
more.'

Janet Betts, the mother of Leah, who died after taking ecstasy at her 18th
birthday party in 1995, delivered a withering attack on Brian Paddick after
his statement to the Select Committee: 'We seem to be losing sight of the
big idea that people should not be doing drugs in the first place. I'm sick
of senior police officers who are just worried about balancing their books.
They don't give a stuff about the kids on the street.'

But Paddick's supporters claim he is simply being honest about policing
priorities and saying publicly what many senior officers know to be the
case. As Andy Hayman, who is responsible for drug policy at Acpo, told The
Observer, many forces already issue cautions for first-time possession of
ecstasy and no longer treat it as a Class A drug, such as heroin and
cocaine. Acpo's own evidence to the Select Committee made it clear that
they would support the declassification of ecstasy from the top category if
medical and scientific evidence supported it.

Paddick is said to be 'bullish' about the results of his six-month pilot
scheme in Lambeth. He argues that a typical arrest takes his officers off
the streets for five hours, costs UKP10,000 to bring to court and leads to
an average fine of UKP46. But some officers in his Lambeth force privately
say that the new system of automatic cautions is just as time-consuming.

Dame Ruth Runciman, whose report on drugs for the Police Foundation in
March recommended reform of the law on ecstasy and heroin, said Paddick's
experiment in Lambeth had heralded a revolution in drugs policy. More than
anything, it had paved the way for David Blunkett's announcement that the
possession of small amounts of cannabis would no longer be an arrestable
offence. 'These significant steps mean that we have a real opportunity to
make our drug laws more credible, proportionate and effective,' she told
The Observer. She said that her committee had emphasised the importance of
developing a 'hierarchy of risk' and that, although there were around 20
deaths a year from ecstasy, this did not compare with the far larger number
who died from heroin and crack cocaine.

The shift in policy also recognises the importance of the work of academics
such as Mike Hough, director of the Criminal Policy Research Unit at South
Bank University, who has been arguing for years that there is no direct
causal link between drug-taking and crime. 'Accepting the principle in the
legislation that drugs should be classified according to objective levels
of risk, I agree that ecstasy should be in a lower class than heroin, and
cannabis in a lower class than ecstasy.'

Organisations working in the drugs field have called on the police to stop
fighting among themselves and develop a coherent line consistent with the
newly liberal atmosphere. Roger Howard of the government-funded drugs
charity Drugscope said: 'Our own submission to the Home Affairs Select
Committee recommended policing reforms, so we are extremely happy with what
has been said by David Blunkett and Brian Paddick.' But he said that Acpo
should publish its full written submissions to the Runciman report and the
Select Committee inquiries in an attempt to unify the differing policies on
drugs arrests by forces across Britain.

For the first time, drugs charities, academic experts, Home Office civil
servants and the Home Secretary himself all accept the principle that
Britain's drug laws are ripe for reform. But last week's events demonstrate
that the faultline between reformers and traditionalists within the police
force remains the biggest hurdle to genuine change in the one place it
really matters - the street.