The Metropolitan police commissioner has criticised hypocritical middle-class cocaine users who care about fair trade and organic food, but who she said are fuelling the drug trade.

Cocaine was used by an estimated 875,000 people in 2017-18 according to the latest crime survey for England and Wales – the highest number in a decade and a 15% year-on-year rise.

Cressida Dick, the UK’s most senior police chief, said: “There is this challenge that there are a whole group of middle-class – or whatever you want to call them – people who will sit round … happily think about global warming and fair trade, and environmental protection and all sorts of things, organic food, but think there is no harm in taking a bit of cocaine. Well, there is; there’s misery throughout the supply chain.”

Use of cocaine in England and Wales is higher than at any point in the past 10 years and the EU drugs agency has said purity of street cocaine is at its highest level in a decade.

The Tottenham MP, David Lammy, citing reports from Interpol and Europol, has said the white middle-class market for cocaine was booming at the same time that many of the killings were being fuelled by an increase in the movement of drugs, particularly the class A substance.

John Coles, head of special operations at the National Crime Agency, has said gangs’ drug activities “are in part fuelling the surge in violent crime in London.”



There has been a sharp rise in the number of arrests of teenagers for drug dealing, prompting concern about young people being groomed to work as drug mules in county lines operations.

Dick described the cocaine problem in the capital as one “which goes well beyond the police” with “high demand … causing many of the challenges”.



At the other end of the social spectrum she said the Met had been raiding crack houses and her officers were applauded on an estate after arresting suspected drug dealers a fortnight ago.



In another example of the effect on Londoners’ lives, she said: “I met a little girl the other day who was saying ‘I feel concerned by ... the paraphernalia’, she didn’t actually use that word, but, ‘the paraphernalia of drug dealing I get in my staircase’.”

Dick’s concerns about drug use echo those of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Last week he criticised people who took cocaine at “middle-class parties” believing it to be a victimless crime.

In May, the justice secretary, David Gauke, said middle-class people who used cocaine “should feel a degree of guilt and responsibility” when they saw stories of teenagers being murdered in Hackney, east London.

Drugs and gangs have been behind the spate of “street homicides” in London that have mainly involved young people, Dick said. There have already been 87 homicides this year, compared with 117 in the whole of last year.

Recently published national statistics showed a surge in serious offences such as murder, manslaughter and stabbings, helping to fuel concerns about violent crime. However, Dick said the picture was stabilising.

“What I can report is that in the last several weeks, we have seen the rates of many categories of violent crime, I would describe as beginning to stabilise,” she said. “I mean by that they are definitely not increasing, they are indeed flattening, and in some categories they are reducing.”

Dick said there had been “continuous reductions” in scooter-enabled crime since last summer – although there was a rise which she described as a “blip” in June – and that knife crime involving under-25s was starting to fall.

There had only been one “street homicide” in July, Dick said: 18-year-old Latwaan Griffiths died of stab wounds after being dropped off at hospital in Camberwell, south London, by a moped rider.

“In the first five months of 2018 we saw on average around 15 homicides per month, for June and July the average was around six a month,” she said.

Dick made violent crime her priority when she became commissioner. Since she set up the violent crime task force, consisting of more than 150 officers, with £15m of funding from Khan, in April, it has made more than 500 arrests and taken more than 200 knives and offensive weapons and13 firearms off the streets.

Det Supt Sean Yates from the task force said police officers could not solve the problem alone, particularly with children being pulled into violence at a younger age.

“There should be conversations had in schools, not necessarily by police officers but by teachers with their children. The teacher understands the class dynamic,” he said.

“We’ve seen an explosion in social media, all young children now have got phones. It’s not unknown for seven- or eight-year-old children to have phones. They are being exposed to violent incidents intentionally or not because they’re viewing this on social media.

“The teacher knows the classrooms better than any police officer would, and they can have those conversations one-to-one with children about what they might be being exposed to, what they’re witnessing, or if they’re peripherally being drawn into it.”

Dick said the Met had conducted more than 10,000 weapon sweeps since April, yielding 1,200 knives, 140 firearms and 450 other offensive weapons. She said 74 people had been charged and 123 arrested in relation to the 87 homicides this year.

Dick defended stop and search, which is controversial for its disproportionate use against black people, saying it had led to more than 200 of the arrests made by the task force.