Blog: Tony Hogg discusses summer policing and his campaign against 'legal highs'

Devon and Cornwall's Police and Crime Commissioner, Tony Hogg discusses the challenges that the summer season brings to policing in the region and highlights his campaign against 'legal highs'

The summer holiday is in full swing and as the sun seems to have accepted the key role it has to play in proceedings this year, the annual migration to the south west of eight million holidaymakers is well underway.

The roads are busy with cars that have travelled hundreds of miles – their drivers often stressed, pubs are packed with people enjoying a drink on their holidays, the sea is warm and enticing to sun-seekers in need of a dip, the hills, moors and forests are heavy with walkers and cyclists. It’s great that people can come here and enjoy what we are lucky to have 365 days a year.

All this gives a welcome and needed boost to the south west economy but it also puts massive pressure on all those working in the public sector.

Emergency departments overload with minor injuries, councils strive to keep the area looking spic and span and the police force (one which receives a relatively small cut of national police funding to start with) is stretched to keep people safe, prevent and detect crime and protect the vulnerable.

Fortunately, this is not a new position for the police here and I know that Chief Constable Shaun Sawyer and his team plan well ahead to make sure they have the resources needed to deal with the influx of holidaymakers, while still providing an excellent service to those who live in this beautiful part of the world.

Devon and Cornwall remains one of the safest places to live in the UK and that is why I have worked so hard, along with the chief constable, to ensure funding is in place to maintain officer numbers at over 3,000 and so that there remains sufficient police staff to provide the excellent, value for money, backroom function that they do.

I will continue to lobby both central and local government to make sure that remains the case but I also want to mention another subject which I feel is emerging as a threat to many in our communities - so-called legal highs and the ‘head shops’ which sell them.

Legal highs are chemicals which have not, in most cases, been used in drugs for human consumption before, so haven't been tested to show that they are safe. Users can never be certain what they are taking and what the effects might be.

Well we can see the effects every week in our local media.

There have been two deaths in the past year or so in Plymouth which were attributable to legal highs. Then just a few weeks ago a 15-year-old in Torquay became unconscious after taking some noxious drug, and on the same weekend two other young people were hospitalised in Exeter.

It is a growing concern and I really feel they pose at least as big a risk to society as illegal drugs.

Some chemicals, like mephadrone, have now been made illegal but we cannot wait for the authorities to ban all of the substances currently being sold to our young people, that isn’t realistic.

It cannot be right that shops can simply mark these potentially lethal substances as ‘not for human consumption’ and get away with selling them, in full knowledge of how they are intended to be used.

This is something we have to join forces to defeat. Parents, schools, local authorities and police need to get together and cut of the supply of these chemicals before even more families suffer tragedy.

This can start in the home by educating children about the dangers of legal highs, in the same way that we teach all our kids not to drink from bottles they find under the sink.

But it may also need direct action on our streets. I will be working with local councils to make sure they do all they can to stop head shops from trading in this misery but, where they cannot stop this, it may take people power to force the shops out of business.

I will be taking a long look at what I can do as police and crime commissioner to help people who want to rid their communities of legal highs.