Source: Advertiser, The (Australia) Contact: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 Author: Jeremy Pudney, Nadine Williams and John Merriman POLICE CHIEF'S VOW TO CLEAN UP STREETS THE Police Commissioner, Mr Hyde, has declared war on "street-level" drug dealers. He has sounded the warning to combat an alarming increase in overdose deaths, heroin use and drug-related crime. Mr Hyde has given dealers a blunt message: "You had better look out." "We think drugs - heroin in particular - is such a major problem for the community we must solve it and if we solve that, then we can solve the crime problem, too," he told The Advertiser. "If we are going to solve our crime problem, we have to solve the heroin problem." Mr Hyde has adopted the tough stance in the light of figures which link drug addicts to a 30 per cent jump in violent robberies in the past 12 months. In a strategy designed to make an immediate impact on the escalating level of drug-related crime, Mr Hyde said police would focus on street-level dealers and not just the "Mr Bigs". "My argument is that if illicit drug use, particularly heroin, is the cause of a lot of our problems, let's look at that and see if we can do something different to stop the criminal offending," he said. "Perhaps if we increases our operations against street-level traffickers . . . it should have a more immediate impact on the availability of heroin in the community, it should have a more immediate impact on people engaged in trafficking and we expect also that it would have a disruptive impact on organised networks. - --- Checked-by: Don Beck