Martin Hannan: 'Distant' crimes hit close to home

Published on Tuesday 13 April 2010 09:49

IT'S not just in Ian Rankin's Rebus books that there exists a Janus city called Edinburgh with its beautiful face shown to the world while masking a dark underbelly riddled with drugs and concomitant violence.

It's real, this bipolar town. Edinburgh has serious crime problems and they are not going to go away. Smug in middle-class enclaves, many think such things as organised crime and gang warfare are problems for the sink estates.

Others think that gangs are a Glasgow phenomenon and they do all their dirty work at the other end of the M8. As if criminals don't have cars . . .

It's true that violent crime is more likely in certain parts of Leith rather than Morningside, but that doesn't mean to say that the problems caused by organised crime only affect people in certain locales. On the contrary, they affect us all.

The reason why can be summed up in one word – drugs. It is not that long ago that Edinburgh was Scotland's heroin-injecting capital, which in turn led to the rapid spread of HIV due to the sharing of infected needles. It was horrible proof that this city had a serious drugs culture, and it still has. And where you get drugs you get criminals, extortion, fraud, burglary, prostitution, theft and violence.

Those problems have not gone away. If anything, they have worsened. Who would have believed that a cannabis farm would be discovered in the cellar of a pub in Newhaven, as happened last year?

More than ten years ago, I attended a lecture by that fine Scottish judge Lord McCluskey in which he cited his own personal evidence on the growth of drugs crime. When he first became an advocate in the 1950s, very few cases that came before the high courts and sheriff courts involved drugs. By the time he was preparing to retire from the bench ten years ago, Lord McCluskey said most cases heard by judges involved drugs of some kind or other.

Successive governments had clearly failed with their drugs policies and not surprisingly, Lord McCluskey's appeal for a Royal Commission on drugs and the law – he favoured legalising cannabis – fell on deaf ears, because politicians cannot be seen to be 'soft' on crime.

Personally, I don't want cannabis legalised because it's been so much easier to breathe since the ban on smoking tobacco in public, and why replace one foul weed with another? Nor should we decriminalise Class A drugs, because they are simply not safe to use.

Yet as a society, as a city, we must look at doing something and more police and longer sentences hasn't worked so far and never will. Perhaps it is time for a Royal Commission, as Lord McCluskey suggested, to consider new drug policies including the legalisation of cannabis – they make a very nice 'pot cake' in Amsterdam, I'm told, so there would be no need to smoke it.

The real drugs problems in this city are caused by heroin and cocaine in their various forms, as well as ecstasy and rarer items like mescaline. As for the so-called legal 'high' drug mephedrone, or meow meow, I pity the authorities because as soon as this particular concoction of chemicals is outlawed, some chemist will find another new legal drug.

It's a never-ending war for the police against the suppliers of these drugs, and I think their tactics to target organised crime have been spot on.

Since it began operations, Edinburgh's Serious and Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) has had considerable success in clamping down on the gangs who are overwhelmingly involved in drug supply and attendant criminality. The SOCU officers have arrested 60 people in six months, and identified 400,000 worth of criminal assets for seizing, while they have also impounded drugs and weapons. That's a result in anyone's terms, but there's so much more to do.

Don't take my word for it. Here's what Detective Chief Inspector David Gordon of the SOCU, said last month: "Drugs is the single largest activity in serious and organised crime and is also involved in other activities such as fraud, violence and money-laundering."

DCI Gordon and his unit are convinced Capital crime gangs are using links with their counterparts in Glasgow and abroad to develop new tactics and smuggle more drugs and weapons into Edinburgh.

That is really and truly worrying, because drug abuse and the supply of drugs is something that cuts across all classes, and when it comes to investigating organised crime, jailing offenders, supporting victims, rehabilitating addicts, and paying for methadone treatments, the people who pay are the citizens of Edinburgh through their taxes.

So don't think criminal gangs and drug wars are something that don't occur on your doorstep. They have an impact on you that is much closer, namely in your wallet or purse.

Think on that and you'll join me in applauding the work of the SOCU and all those who are trying to keep wholesale organised crime out of Edinburgh. Rebus just about managed it, and they just might, too.