Police respond to residents’ meeting with threats
IWCA warned against ‘contravening human rights’ of dealers
Responding to the IWCA public meeting on the drugs issue, Inspector Eugene Gratwohl of Oxford police issued a warning to Blackbird Leys residents, telling them they could be ‘overstepping the mark’.
Speaking in the Oxford Mail (‘Residents Threaten Action on Dealers’, 1 July), Inspector Gratwohl said that residents who tried to gather their own evidence or demonstrated outside the homes of drug dealers risked ‘contravening the human rights of those implicated.’
The police statement on the issue of ‘human rights’ for crack and heroin dealers will do nothing to reassure concerned residents that police priorities are in order, particularly as councillor Stuart Craft was recently stopped by a PC while canvassing prior to the IWCA public meeting. The officer addressed Mr Craft by name and asked him to explain what he was doing.
In any case, without police advice, the IWCA had already made it clear to residents at the public meeting that any campaigns against crack and heroin dealing would stay within the law.
Defending the police’s record, Inspector Gratwohl said the police are carrying out ‘disruption patrols to discourage drug dealing’ in Blackbird Leys. However, residents at the recent public meeting have spoken about patrol cars sitting at opposite entrances to Gillians Park while crack and heroin dealers ply their trade within. ‘Whatever these patrols are intended to disrupt,’ commented Lee Cole of the IWCA, ‘it is clearly not the drug dealers.’
Leys Independent, Issue 14, July 2002
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