Pubdate: Wed, 05 Jul 2000
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Website: http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/guardian/
Address: 75 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER, England
Contact:  http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/BBS/News/0,2161,Latest|Topics|3,00.html
Copyright: 2000 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Author: Nick Hopkins

'WILD WEST' BORDER TOWN PLAGUED BY THE INNER-CITY CURSE OF DRUGS

Drugs in Britain: Special Report

Wrexham is a tough place. The border town in north Wales is not quite
the Wild West it used to be 20 years ago, when drunken brawls on a
Friday and Saturday night were a way of life. But people still prefer
to sort out problems in their own way.

Take Susan Ryan and her daughter Emma. On millennium eve another of
Susan's daughters, Jessica, was feeling ill and her mood swings were
the talk of a party at their home in Glan Gors. At one point Jessica
started to cry. Then she became violent.

Her father restrained her by sitting on her. In the pandemonium Mrs
Ryan, 42, discovered she had been given some "smack" to "celebrate"
2000 by a drug addict who lived close by.

Mrs Ryan and Emma, 18, went to the addict's house. They had words with
the woman. Then they kicked and punched her. They forced her to kneel
and ordered her to say "I am scum, I am scum."

When the beating was over, Mrs Ryan called the police. In March she
and Emma pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm. Magistrates
were sympathetic, saying the women had been severely provoked. They
were sentenced to 80 and 60 hours' community service
respectively.

Wrexham has overcome challenges before. The town could have been
damaged beyond repair by the closure of coal mines, breweries and
steel works in the 1970s and 80s, but it got on with the business of
survival and reinvented itself. Today it faces different challenges.
One is drugs.

Vulnerable to Crime

The curse of many inner cities has started to corrode this and many
other provincial towns. Wrexham is vulnerable to organised crime
because the police and the people are unsure how to defend themselves.
The dealers who speed down the M53 from Liverpool and the M56 from
Manchester know it.

They regard Wrexham's two council estates, Caia Park and Plas Madoc,
as virgin territory. They have brought with them what one local
councillor calls "a poverty of expectation, and a sense of
overwhelming despair".

Heroin is cheaper in Wrexham than almost anywhere else in the country.
Children aged seven have been caught smoking cannabis. Wrexham's
coroner warned recently that one person overdoses on methadone every
month. And where there are drug dealers, there are loan sharks. Both
carry guns.

It would be unfair to exaggerate the problem. Wrexham is not overrun
by junkies and in recent years the police have managed to cut crime on
limited resources. But drugs are a menace and they will not go away.

"We know it's going on, but we're not quite sure how bad it is," said
one officer. "At least we could see the drunks when they were fighting."

Wrexham is the largest town in north Wales, with a population of
125,000. It can be dated to the 12th century and during the civil war
it supported the royalists, who were defeated by the roundheads at the
battle of Rowton Moor outside Chester in 1645.

Wrexham's most famous son is George Jeffreys, who became lord chief
justice in 1683. He was better known as Hanging Judge Jeffreys, or the
Blood Judge,a nickname earned for the brutal way in which he conducted
the trials of supporters of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, who had
plotted to overthrow James II.

In recent years, Wrexham's claims to notoriety have rested with the
local football club's occasional charges in the FA Cup, and the child
abuse scandal at the Bryn Estyn children's home.

Wrexham is surrounded by wonderful Denbighshire hills to the west and
some of the smarter parts of Shropshire to the east. But the town has
neither beauty nor charm.

There is hostility to England, but more to affluent south Wales,
particularly Cardiff. In some ways, this resentment is hard to fathom.
When Wrexham lost its traditional industries, it turned to food
manufacturers. It is now a prosperous town, with major employers like
Kellogg's and Cadbury's.

Although Wrexham has a reputation for being rough, the crime figures
tell a different story. There has not been a murder in Wrexham for two
years. The three attempted murders were "domestics" and solved easily.

The town has 183 police officers who deal with most of the 22,000
incidents reported in the division, which covers the eastern part of
north Wales. Crime seems to be falling. There were 3,700 crimes
reported in April and May last year, 3,500 this year.

Violent crime has dropped by 35% over the course of the year, the
number of burglaries has fallen slightly and detection rates for crime
overall have risen.

CCTV Success

Some of the town's anti-crime initiatives have proved a great success.
Four years ago Wrexham county borough council spent A3250,000 setting
up CCTV cameras around the town centre to deter vandals, thieves and
drunks. The cameras had an immediate impact, so the council put up
more. There are now 40 cameras watching the shopping parades, two
others monitor the car parks on the Plas Madoc estate, and four could
soon be mounted in Caia Park.

Security guards at the major stores are equipped with a "Shoplink"
radio, which keeps them in touch with officers in the CCTV control
room. They tip each other off if troublemakers or thieves are on the
prowl. A similar scheme links Wrexham's pubs and clubs.

"We've always had trouble in the town centre at turfing out time,"
said Detective Chief Inspector Chris Corcoran, 47. "Since we've had
the cameras, we've made more arrests. And because we had people caught
on film, we got more convictions. The cameras cut out the need for
lengthy investigations. With this system, you need one officer and the
CCTV footage to get a guilty plea. They have been a tremendous success."

Other issues which worry city forces hardly register in Wrexham. There
have been only two reported racial incidents in the past 12 months.

The town is 99% white and the force has struggled to recruit any
officers from ethnic minorities. "We want to recruit our officers
locally, but we don't have any racial communities to recruit from,"
said Mr Corcoran. "If we recruit from elsewhere, we could end up
isolating them."

A more pressing problem is the need to recruit women, and officers who
can speak Welsh. There has been a revival of the language in recent
years and 15% of the town is bilingual. Like many of his generation,
Mr Corcoran is not, but his children are taught Welsh at school.

The Caia estate, where he grew up, requires his closest attention. It
is a sprawl of 3,000 terraced homes on the outskirts of the town. It
had a reputation as one of the roughest places in Wales. One local
politician, who asked not to be named, said: "Twenty years ago, Caia
was like the Wild West. Juvenile crime was out of control. I think the
council would have liked to fence it off and throw food in once a week."

Instead, the council supported a community project called The Venture.
This began as an adventure playground for children, but has expanded
over the past 22 years to offer services like a homework club and
outreach work. The playground, built by children on the estate, is
still the heart of the scheme.

Thanks to The Venture, crime on Caia fell spectacularly during the
1980s and early 90s, but then the atmosphere began to change. "There
had always been some drugs on the estate - glue-sniffing and things
like that," said Malcolm King, manager of The Venture.

Liverpool Dealers

"But we noticed harder drugs were being sold here seven or eight years
ago. It seems the dealers in Liverpool were looking for new markets,
and they came to Wrexham. The drugs flooded in. The heroin addicts
were easy to spot _ shrivelled up and gaunt-eyed."

He added: "Drugs have eaten their way into parts of the estate and we
have struggled to keep cohesion. Once we've lost a child to drugs, it
is very hard to get them back. I resent that. There are good kids on
the Caia. They should have a chance in life."

The police are unsure how big the problem has become. There are no
statistics on drug dealing. The evidence comes from anecdotes and from
the number of addicts - one a month - who end up in the morgue.

There have also been rumours that the police use of informers led to a
crackdown on some dealers, while others were left to flourish. Mr
Corcoran denies there has been any trade off, but confirmed one
officer in the drugs squad is suspended and under investigation.

"The drugs problem is something we can't really tackle on our own,"
said one detective. The feeling, though, is that city police forces
and agencies like the national crime squad are not particularly
interested in a backwater like Wrexham. "One imagines they have bigger
fish to fry," said the officer.

Wrexham

Population: 125,200

Number of police: 183 officers

Reported crimes across eastern division of North Wales police last
year: 22,000

Detection rate for division: 33%
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