25
Mar
2013
By Calvin at 14:02 GMT, 13 years ago
Thanks to our friend Dave Stubbs for bringing our attention to the following article:
The Daily Telegraph and Liverpool Echo last week gave accounts about a report to Liverpool Council bosses about the misuse of on-street internet kiosks by drug dealers. The newspaper reports conclude that these now obsolete kiosks are going to be scrapped and it seems that few will shed tears at their impending removal.
The report states that internet use at the 20 kiosks had reduced by 90% since they were introduced and that the texting service accounted for 80% of all activity with just three of the kiosks accounting for a third of the texting. The report goes on to say that over the past 12 months there had been a marked increase in complaints about the booths which had been attracting increased anti-social behaviour and use by drug dealers using the texting service to arrange drug deals.
TCPW Comment This is not the first and will certainly not be the last time that on-street service kiosks have generated crime problems and anti-social behaviour. As I discovered when working in the inner cities, telephone kiosks, especially enclosed ones, have always been used for nefarious reasons. It’s not so much the kiosk itself but its location that has caused the problem. The ‘old-fashioned’ style telephone boxes and their more modern enclosed equivalents dotted around Soho and Bloomsbury in the West End of London were forever being used by prostitutes, drug users and dealers. They also turned out to be great places for toileting, especially by revellers late at night going home from the nightclubs.
The Telecommunications Act did and probably still does require there to be a public place telephone service, but as mobile phones took over and kiosk use declined (to the point that they were barely economical) the operators had to work out how they could use them to turn a profit. Advertising became BT’s first attempt to turn fortunes around, but the posters simply made them even more visually enclosed and more attractive to misuse. In some parts of the West End local residents and business people got so fed up with the ‘goings on’ that they used to take the doors off or chain them up! Worse still was that attempts to replace them with better designs to thwart the misuse were hindered by the fact that many of the old ones are ‘listed’ and have to remain.
Huge care must be taken by our local authorities when they place these things on our footways and I would hope that the council’s planners and highways people always consult the police before new ones get installed. You know this would make sense!
Original article Liverpool Echo http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-communities/west-derby-tuebrook/west-derby-tuebrook-news/2013/03/18/liverpool-council-to-scrap-on-street-free-text-booths-used-by-criminals-to-arrange-drug-deals-100252-33009517/
