A day of action earlier this week by GMP saw four people arrested on a range of offences as work continues to disrupt, prevent and tackle serious organised crime involving drugs which are linked to the prison communities.
The Driver of a suspected stolen vehicle made off from officers as they turned into HMP Forest Bank after seeing the operation while Drugs, mobile phones and tobacco seized over the past four weeks as police intercepted a number of drones destined for Greater Manchester’s prisons.
The day saw police focus attention on the four prisons in our region, HMP Manchester in the city centre, HMP Buckley Hall in Rochdale, HMP Forest Bank in Salford and HMP Hindley in Wigan, conducting a high-visibility policing operation inside and outside of each establishment.
Neighbourhood teams from each district and our Dog Unit carried out perimeter sweeps of each prison. Officers from our Roads Policing Unit also ran traffic operation using Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) to check any vehicles coming into the prison.
Outside of HMP Forest Bank, a suspected stolen vehicle saw officers and made off from them, leading to a pursuit through a residential area before the occupants decamped. A man in his 30s and a woman in her 20s were detained a short time later, on suspicion of theft of a motor vehicle.
Elsewhere across the day, another two arrests were made, a man in his 30s was arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender and a man in his 40s was also arrested on suspicion of breaching serious crime prevention order.
Officers and partners in Rochdale targeted shops that were believed to be linked to the supply of illegal cigarettes, tobacco and vapes into prisons. After searches of two address on Drake Street, £33,000 worth of contraband was seized.
Detective Superintendent Andy Buckthorpe who is our Force strategic lead for threat from Organised Crime in Prisons said: “This operation is a culmination of several months work to bring together each district and partners to combat and tackle the crime threat that we are seeing in our four Manchester prisons.
“We have four prisons in Greater Manchester, and they all have slightly different threats in relation to organised crime, we have recently seen the prevalence of contraband coming from the community into our prison establishments and that is one of the main reasons why we have stepped up our efforts over the past few years to tackle this.
“There is a market inside the prison for contraband for controlled drugs, mobile phones and tobacco, which once they are transported inside the walls are worth up to five times their value on the outside.
“At the start of October we launched a multi-agency drugs strategy, and over the last year we increased arrests within the top tiers of GM’s organised crime groups by 69%, and we will do everything we can, alongside our partners, to make sure this number continues to rise.”
