Drugs raid on popular estate in Bishop Auckland

Jun 13 2009 by Neil McKay, The Journal

POLICE using a battering ram smashed down the door of a suspected drugs dealer yesterday, just yards from a leafy park.

Unlike the popular images of dealers plying their evil trade from seedy flats on run-down “sink estates,” the home of the alleged dealer targeted yesterday is in a popular residential area.

Short Street in the market town of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, faces sideways on to Cockton Hill Recreation Ground, where pensioners enjoy a game of bowls, teenagers play football and children play on swings and slides.

It is just 100 yards away from the town’s police station.

Police raided the terraced house yesterday as part of Operation Nimrod – aimed at reducing the amount of class A drugs such as heroin flooding the streets of Bishop Auckland.

Neighbourhood police community support officer Ian Feldon said: “It is sickening that drug dealing allegedly takes place within sight of this park. It will be full of children after school.

“We chose the early afternoon to raid this property because children live in the house targeted, and we believed they would be at school at the time of the raid.

“The vast majority of people in this neighbourhood are decent and law-abiding. They have provided information leading to this operation. But drugs are a scourge of all communities. They are an unacceptable part of modern culture.”

A man was led away in handcuffs following the raid, and a police sniffer dog was sent into the house.

The operation followed a series of raids by up to 100 officers on addresses in Bishop Auckland earlier this week.

Four men aged 25, 29, 30 and 34, and four women, 24, 25, 27 and 28, were detained as part of the operation aimed at smashing the supply chain of class A drugs, including heroin.

The raids, in the Woodhouse Close and Coundon Grange areas came after officers spent more than six months watching suspects and gathering evidence following tip-offs from the public.

Meanwhile, drugs worth thousands of pounds, cash and weapons were seized as police spent a week cracking down on illegal drugs in Newcastle.

Officers from Northumbria Police carried out more than 35 early morning raids at the homes of suspected drugs dealers throughout the week,.

In South Tyneside, there were nine arrests, as a result of 12 raids and drugs with a street value of around £9,300 were seized, along with £4,500 in cash.

And in Blyth, Northumberland, three warrants were executed and five people arrested, while police in North Tyneside, made one arrest for cultivating cannabis, after 39 plants were recovered, and four arrests for possession of cannabis.