Letter: Landor Road: a street ruled by drugs and crime

Sir: I read with interest your second-section cover story 'The street where I live' (2 November). I too have lived on this street for the past eight years and watched it deteriorate. It makes me more than a little angry to remember how the relaxed attitude and tolerance of the people living here has gradually been replaced by open hostility and fear. The more so when you consider how simple it would have been (and still is) to avoid the problem.

Drug-dealing is a commercial enterprise, and as such needs the basics of any modern business: premises, phones and good marketing. If you want to stop drug dealers doing effective business, hit them where it hurts. Keep them moving, make it more tricky for them to use the phone and tax them. Stop these idiotic raids, which rarely find anything other than recently used toilet paper, and which glamorise the drug dealers and make the police look like thugs.

Put the police stations where they are needed. If an area is in particular need of a police station, put one there. When it is no longer needed, move it. It doesn't have to be very big, say six or seven officers with a nice big window; and they don't have to do much: drink some tea, take a few photos. A highly mobile, community police station would make it virtually impossible for a situation like this to develop.

It's not that I am very keen on having a police station at the bottom of my road, nor (in common with many other Londoners) do I have anything against the informed use of drugs, it's just that I have got to walk home tonight.

Yours sincerely,

JOHN BROWN

London, SW9

2 November

The writer is using a pseudonym.