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Straight-talking top police officer Andrea McMullan cracks down on drugs trade

Detective Chief Superintendent Andrea McMullan of the PSNI's organised crime unit. Picture by Hugh Russell
Detective Chief Superintendent Andrea McMullan of the PSNI's organised crime unit. Picture by Hugh Russell Detective Chief Superintendent Andrea McMullan of the PSNI's organised crime unit. Picture by Hugh Russell

THE PSNI has claimed a series of successful drugs busts in recent months, resulting in hundreds of thousands of pounds of narcotics being taken out of circulation.

The woman tasked with leading the organised crime unit that is cracking down on the lucrative trade is straight-talking Detective Chief Superintendent Andrea McMullan.

With drug seizures at a 10-year high, she told how there has been a change in the police approach.

"Previously we set up a specialist drug squad, but the difficulty is with organised crime and criminals they are not just doing drugs, they are doing anything that makes money - organised crime is a business," she told the Irish News.

"They'll be into extortion, they'll blackmail people, they'll be into burglaries and thefts, anything they can make money off with the least risk - and drugs you can make money from.

"We recognised that and so over the last four or five years we've really changed how we work. Instead of looking at the commodity, we look at the people.

"If I was just looking for just drugs I might miss thousands of pounds going through your bank account from money laundering or I might miss some of the connections you have.

"So we've become better at that but we've also become better at engaging with communities and better at taking the information they give, because some of the best information we have comes in as low-level community intelligence.

"I think success breeds success. Some of the younger generations didn't grow up with the same boundaries - I think there's a lot more structure around community engagement."

Cannabis was by far the most commonly recovered drug in the last financial year, accounting for 4,445 of seizures, with benzodiazepines (prescription drugs), mainly diazepam, in the next highest category at 614 seizures.

Cocaine was found during 566 police raids.

Ms McMullan said peace investment is paying off when it comes to community engagement on issues such as drugs.

"It's not perfect and there are still people who don't trust the police but we are getting information. Before that went into a district pot, now it doesn't and intelligence is much better organised."

In September detectives from the Reactive and Organised Crime Branch arrested a 28-year-old man and seized cocaine, heroin and herbal cannabis with an estimated street value of £1.2m packed into a car on the West Bank Road in Belfast.

A few days previously police seized herbal cannabis worth around £280,000 in a car in Derry.

In total 182.4kg of cannabis resin was taken off the streets by police between April last year and March this year - a sharp increase on the previous year.

Ms McMullan said: "Cannabis is still the drug of prevalence. I would suggest that the recent cocaine find wasn't all destined for Northern Ireland - we have a market for cocaine and it is one of the drugs of choice but it's not the biggest market, our biggest market is cannabis.

"We work with Border Force and take drugs out of the postal system. We never let drugs through, we always take them out of the system.

"There's never huge amounts of heroin coming in because the heroin market in Northern Ireland is very small.

"It's not a drug of first choice, no-one would ever start with heroin, addiction is physical and the physical need for the opiates can't be satisfied and they then move to heroin.

"We are seeing heroin deaths, but if you've been on heroin you will die when you are about 40, so actually heroin deaths are an indication of the problem 10 years ago.".

The senior detective confirmed that paramilitaries remain among the organised crime gangs involved in the transportation and sale of illegal drugs in Northern Ireland but said the lines are in some cases "blurred".

"There are paramilitaries involved in drug dealing at the street level, at the middle level and at the orchestrated level, at the very high level.

"Whether those paramilitaries are involved for their own means and paying off someone or whether they are involved to raise funds for paramilitarism is less clear.

"If they are involved for their own means I would quite confidently suggest that they wouldn't be doing it without the paramilitary group knowing what they are at because that would put you at odds with that group.

"So whether the organisation turns a blind eye, or whether the organisation says 'yes you can do it as long as we get a cut of the profits', or whether it's orchestrated by the organisation is very difficult to know.

"I think in certain certain republican communities you would have 'taxation' of drug dealers rather than actually drug dealing.

"They would say 'we don't allow drug dealing in our communities, but as long as you pay us money we'll let on we haven't seen you'.

"The lines are blurred and speaking from my experience, having been a police officer in north Belfast for a long time, there are people who were paramilitaries and who are genuinely investing in peace.

"There are others who are maybe invested in peace but still quite liked the money they were getting, so it's this big mish mash at the minute".

Ms McMullan said police intend to target those profiting from organised crime, the dealers higher up the food chain than those at street level, through the PSNI economic crime unit.

"We have millions seized in assets that goes to England to be sold but those are the kingpins - the next layer is people living in the communities who might have big TVs, they're not working but are running a car and taking two holidays a year.

"So they're living an upper middle class lifestyle within a working class community with no visible income - they can't all have won the lottery.

"Low-level drug dealers are making enough to feed their own habit (and) whilst we will always go for anyone dealing drugs they are not the people we want.

"It's that next layer and the layer after that, they are making money, difference is they don't get their hands dirty.

"So it's getting that across to communities, who say 'sure everyone knows he's drug dealing' - he's not drug dealing, he's controlling drug dealers and the chance of me catching him drug dealing, well it isn't going to happen.

"That's what we'd like the community to be telling us, so if you see someone driving an X5 and their granny hasn't just died and left them ten grand then flag it, and we will look at where they are getting their money but we can only do that with intelligence."