Top police chiefs call for crackdown on cannabis
Sir Andy Marsh, who leads the College of Policing, said the smell of the drug makes him feel unsafe as he urged frontline officers to 'do something about it'.
Sir Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, and Serena Kennedy, the chief constable of Merseyside Police, joined him in calling for a tougher line on use of the drug.
They said ignoring 'the little stuff' would lead to confidence in police being undermined as they launched a new leadership programme for policing.
Sir Andy told the Daily Mail: 'In my community, my kids are too frightened to use the bus stop because it always stinks of cannabis.
'I'm speaking from personal experience and people I talk to, if I walk through a town, city, or even village centre and I smell cannabis, it does actually have an impact on how safe I feel.
'One definition of what police should be doing is – [if] something [is] happening which does not feel right, someone ought to do something about it.
'For me, the smell of cannabis around communities, it feels like a sign of crime and disorder.'
His comments are a rebuke to Sir Sadiq Khan, who recently backed legalising possession of small amounts of cannabis over fears drug laws are damaging relations between police and ethnic minorities.
The Mayor of London came out in favour of decriminalisation after his independent London drug commission found that cannabis laws were 'disproportionate to the harms it can pose, particularly in the case of possession for personal use'.
Cannabis 'not really low-level crime'
Meanwhile, figures released on Sunday showed three quarters of people caught with the drug were let off with an informal warning.
The head of Merseyside Police said: 'The public should absolutely expect us to take positive action around those things and hold us to account over it.
'We have to work with our communities, it's no longer good enough to inflict priorities on them, we have to hear their voices and make them part of the problem-solving.'
Sir Stephen said: 'This is the so-called lower level stuff, but actually it really isn't lower level stuff in the sense that this is where the public take their cues as to how safe or otherwise they feel, and how effective or otherwise is policing.'
The three also backed an overhaul of the recording of non-crime hate incidents as they are damaging public trust in policing.
Sir Andy said 'immutable damage to trust and confidence' in forces is caused when police handle these things wrong.
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