Police planning series of Sheffield drug warrants as residents urged to report 'suspicious activity'

The comments have been made by Superintendent Benn Kemp when asked to outline South Yorkshire Police’s strategies in response to drug dealing, after Star readers told us it was one of their main crime concerns in the city.

Supt Kemp said the force knows that ‘drug dealing is often linked to organised crime within Sheffield and within all of the districts within South Yorkshire’. 

The force’s response to drug dealing is multifaceted, said Supt Kemp, and includes teams of specialist investigators, all working under the banner of ‘Operation Fortify’ to identify, and dismantle, organised crime groups who profit from drug dealing. 

He continued: We work with partners across a lot of agencies, such as local authority, housing, charities and to really try and address some of the root causes of drug use so looking at the funding of health provision in certain communities, looking at education and awareness inputs, looking at the secondary things so where young people are becoming exploited through drug dealing really focusing around that and educating young people, mapping, identifying them at an early point; and putting in appropriate interventions to prevent them going on and becoming drug dealers."

Supt Kent said he was appealing for members of the public to assist the force by reporting anything 'suspicious' they see in their communities.

"One thing I’m really appealing for is: if people are suspicious of activity that's ongoing in their street or within their community or they see houses where cars are turning up, often, at all hours, or you know, there's something suspicious then use the South Yorkshire Police website, and report it through that because all of the information intelligence that we get is reviewed by a professional who will then make a decision on how best we can progress that. Sometimes, that may lead to - that bit of information may be the missing piece that we need to to execute warrants," he said.

The superintendent said specialist investigators are currently gearing up to execute a number of drug warrants in Sheffield, in premises linked to drug dealing.

When asked which areas of the city are the worst-hit by criminality relating to drug dealing, Supt Kent said: "There certainly isn’t one area that would particularly be a drug dealing hotspot, if you like. Unfortunately, we do get information relating to drug dealing and across a range of different communities within the city and our response is not focused on one specific area.”

The Star also asked Supt Kent why Sheffield's courts only seem to hear cases involving criminals who are further down in the chain of organisations involved in drug supply, and what the force is doing to ensure that those at the top are brought to justice.

He responded: "The force has a number of different specialist teams investigate drug dealing at different levels. At a national level, we work closely with the National Crime Agency (NCA) looking at the the top tier of drug dealers.

"These are the individuals who are organised in mass importation into the UK and we work with the NCA to identify and target those individuals, from that sort of national level right through a regional level we weren't really closely with the Yorkshire and Humber region organised crime unit who deal with region-wide threats so that's looking at the movement of drugs across our county and where their supply in it and that will continue at a South Yorkshire level looking at people who were you know specifically dealing and target in their activity within South Yorkshire.

"So we do have a range of responses from your street dealer, right through to your international organised criminal, and South Yorkshire Police has a really effective response at that and as evidence within our recent HMIC (His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary) inspection.”