Another raid in Commercial Road - surprise surprise !

[Ubique]

From HCC News 

Environmental Health team, Hereford and Worcester Fire and Rescue Service and West Mercia Police officers worked in partnership to carry out the planned action at Munchies and Maxii on Commercial Road, Hereford. 

Illegal cigarettes seized outside Maxii, Hereford

Trading Standards seized approximately 8,000 cigarettes from a vehicle outside Maxii.

Housing Enforcement entered under warrant, and found persons living in the first floor prohibited accommodation above Munchies, and a further enforcement notice will be issued prohibiting sleeping in the ground floor commercial  areas.

Enforcement notices are being issued by Hereford and Worcester Fire and Rescue Service against Munchies for non compliance with previous advice.

One Iraqi Kurd male was arrested an suspicion of being an illegal overstayer since 2011; he was passed on to immigration.

[bobby47]

What's the point in these raids. Seriously, and I'm not being argumentative. What's the point? There's no point to it and it's all being done without any purposeful strategic aim which is how they really should be thinking when they embark on these pointless raids.You can go to any one of these places, every day, at any time and purchase illicit tobacco. It's that easy!

Its quite simply organised crime and the profits are so huge the perpetrators are more than content to tolerate the disruption, which essentially all this is, have one of their number prosecuted and round and round it goes. There's no point to what the authorities are doing. For us, the ratepayers, it's highly expensive and for the authorities, many of which quite enjoy the excitement of investigative work, it's a regular source of highly expensive, time consuming fun that allows them to pretend they're Police Officers and allows them to drift away from what their original job title was, counting bloody paper clips, escaping their desk and taking a walk on the bloody wild side.

The door was opened to this area of illicit activity many years ago. We have all helped in the building of this scaffold and unfortunately there's no closing the door, there's no stopping this area of criminality and the best thing 'they' could do is accept things for what they are and start to think differently on how to deal with this issue. Disruption is not the answer. I don't know what the answer is but I do know that spending tens of thousands of pounds on each of these operations is doing nothing to ease the pain of paying your Council Tax and expecting anything in return for it.

if you don't know what to do, and they don't, then don't do anything. It's a whole lot cheaper and it's certainly more thoughtful than repeatedly popping to see the Clerk To The Justices, swearing out a warrant, popping on their bloody baseball caps and shouting, 'let's rock and roll' and doing the same pointless thing over and over again.

[ragwert]

Problem with illegal immigrants is they won't have any documentation on them so the authorities do not know

Where they have originated from so cannot send them back.immigration centres are so full that they are let go on bail to 

Attend a police station once a week then vanish until they are caught again.

 

[Ubique]

This info was circulated by HCC to the Public via their News Room on the 20th.of this month - hit the HT this afternoon.

[Roger]

There's a trend here. All these immigration/tobacco raids are happening within a 2 minute walk of the local Police HQ. Serious Crime is permanently operating right next door to the people tasked with sorting it out. There is a bust every once in a while but you can walk into town later today and still buy under the counter tobacco. This must be very time consuming and expensive to try and sort out as a total 'fishing' trip for the authorities is never going to happen. The infringements are outpacing the enforcement and penalties imposed. Duncan Reynolds must be tearing his hair out over this!

[Bill Thomas]

Same Iraqi/Kurds, this is clearly a front for many other things

[H.Wilson]

They should just close them down, period!