The Maitland CID’s team of public safety officers faces ongoing challenges with vagrants and homeless people that need to be redirected to shelters for safety.
During the past three months the team had to deal with a number of incidents of substance abuse amongst children and adults. Amongst these were a case of a 15-year old boy who was found in a park under the influence of Tik and almost completely unconscious. School children are regularly found under the M5 bridge smoking dagga. In one such case, they gave false names and when taken to school, nobody knew who they were.
The team from the CID depends a lot on the help of their social partners to help curb these social problems. Unfortunately there are a lot of drug dealers that target the youth in this area.