Ordering drugs through the post a concern in Stockton
People in Stockton are ordering illegal drugs from as far away as California and receiving them through the post, councillors have been told.
Chief Inspector Dan Heron from Stockton ‘s neighbourhood policing team highlighted the trend at a meeting of the Safer Stockton Partnership. He said: “These are cases where people order drugs from outside the country. They could be in varying different quantities, they could be for personal use or buying cannabis from California or buying heroin from elsewhere, that type of stuff.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in Stockton in relation to that. Where the pressure from agencies are rightly targeted on street deals, we are finding a bigger trend, and this is true nationally as well, of people ordering drugs from other countries and using the postal service to get the drugs in, so it’s worth mentioning that extra bit of pressure now we’re seeing around that.”
He presented crime figures for Stockton with a total of 22,239 crimes in the past year, 2,844 fewer than the last year. Homicide, death or injury due to driving and vehicle crime were up on the previous year – with crimes of death or injury due to driving up from five to 17.
But most other crimes were down, with rape down 29%, stalking and harassment down almost 20%, theft down 53%, public disorder down 27.5% and drug trafficking down almost 10%.
Chf Insp Heron said: “Between May 2023 and April 2024, a 10% reduction compared to the previous year. Vehicle crime has been a focus for us, we’ve made some good arrests, some good progress and seen a bit of a decrease in that.
“Month on month we’re now in our 13th consecutive month of crime reduction in total. For the past 13 months we’ve reduced crime. Even at this time of year we’ve projected a decrease.”
Anti-social behaviour was up by 4.1% on the previous year with 4,711 incidents, but Chf Insp Heron said: “ASB in May was 396 reports and in June we were down by 39% and that’s as a result of partnership working with the council and local charities.”
He also said there had been a 57% reduction from comparing May to June: “We did a lot of work with civic officers and partners in Billingham town centre and Thornaby, so that work does have an impact.”
He said nearly 800 people responded to a survey and said their three main priorities were anti-social behaviour, drugs and burglary. He said off-road bikes were not in the top three priorities, yet “there’s not a day goes by that we don’t have multiple reports of off-road bikes. They’re just a total nightmare.”
He added: “We’ve seen significant reductions month on month with burglary, made some good progress around that. It feeds into the perception of crime, fear of crime and actual crime.
“We ran Operation Artemis which was our force response to organised serious crime. We tried to focus on the fear of crime through different bits of engagement.”
Councillor Steve Nelson said residential burglaries dropped 3% for the full year, but when it came to snapshot comparing April 2023 to April 24, there was a 29.6% reduction in residential burglary and a 56% reduction in commercial burglary. He said: “Is that just a complete outlier? It’s almost too good to be true.”
Chf Insp Heron said: “Hopefully that is a trend that will continue. Certainly in recent times we arrested a number of our key burglars who were doing quite a lot of crimes, vehicle crime as well.
“It’s a genuine reduction which hopefully we’re going to build on and continue.”
Superintendent John Wrintmore, district commander for Stockton, said: “Just to give you some kind of snapshot of comparisons for residential burglary, in June we had a 39% reduction compared to the June before, May 17%, April 30%, March a whopping 57% reduction, February 34%, January 31%. It’s a similar picture for robbery as well.”