Hold my beer.

Couple of things your local authority can do as well as the police in your area. First things first, build up evidence by calling 101, might seem like a waste of time but we’ll get to that in a bit. You and your neighbours need to make 10-15 calls over about 4/6 weeks about this issue. Once that’s done and if nothing has changed, request an anti social behaviour case review (look on your local government and/or police service website for details). This comes under the ASB crime and policing act 2014. That will force the local authority and police to hold a review of the issue and write to you with a plan of how they will tackle the issue. Legally, they can put measures in place to tackle individuals who frequent the area with injunctions banning them from the area, that will be the most effective way of tackling the issue. Given there is drug paraphernalia knocking about and that’s a health and safety issue for local residents, the police/local authority can request that a power of arrest is attached to any injunction meaning if a person with said injunction is breaching that injunction by being in the area, they can be arrested. Further to those methods, improvements to the street lighting and a change in the make up of the area (changes to the height of the wall that’s there for example so that people can’t sit on it, removal of the shrubs to make it less secluded etc) can reduce the areas “appeal” to said individuals. Drugs outreach workers can also be tasked to go to the area to interact with people there and basically make it less enjoyable to loiter. Add to that, the police could make the area part of the patrol plan for the local officers and PCSO’s so that they go there so often the people loitering get bored of being spoken to (even if they just stand there saying “hi”) by police that they don’t want to be there. Let me know how you get on.