Bid to clean up drink and drug 'hotbeds'

Nov 19 2008 By Hannah Webster, Staines News

Police are battling to 'reclaim' two areas of Staines that they say have become hotbeds of drug-taking and drinking by youngsters.

Police community support officers Deborah Tippetts and Adam Justice said they have found evidence of cannabis in the youth shelter in the Staines Park in Commercial Road.

They are also concerned about the alleyway off Kingston Road, where youngsters meet to smoke cigarettes.

PCSO Tippetts said: "We get quite a lot of youths hanging around on the corner by the alleyway.

"We have caught quite a few kids smoking there.

"It was getting so overgrown that, to me, it wasn't safe for anyone to walk down there."

In conjunction with county councillor Denise Turner-Stewart, she has organised for offenders on community service to cut back the foliage in the alleyway over the past six weeks, so it is harder for youths to hide there and take drugs or smoke.

PCSO Tippetts thinks it would be best to get rid of the youth shelter in Staines Park, adding: "This place just encourages them to sit in there smoking and drinking.

"We just want to take it out completely.

"They can see us coming into the park from the youth shelter and they have two exits to leave before we get to them."

Cllr Turner-Stewart, Conservative ward member for Staines South and Ashford West, said: "This is part of what I have been wanting to do since I became councillor, to clean up the streets.

"In the last 18 months it has become clear that there are certain areas where you need to remove the opportunity for people to think these are places to congregate.

"If there is nowhere for them to go and do this stuff they have to either do it in their own homes, where they have to face up to what they are doing, or be out in the streets where the police can deal with them." .