Chief Inspector Paul Ormerod of Cambridgeshire Police told Cambridge’s Community Safety Partnership on the 18th of July 2017 that criminals in Cambridge have been carrying bottles of acid and ammonia.
The Chief Inspector said:
What we found is actually it’s not just knives that are being carried. We have had issues over the past year of people carrying bottles of acid and ammonia; very topical you will have seen that in the media, we’ve had that happen in Cambridge City as well. It’s linked to county-lines drugs activity that was a borrowed behaviour from what people have seen happen in London and elsewhere in drug gangs.
Clearly this is very worrying and alarming.
The police did say later in the meeting that those who have been the victims of stabbings in Cambridge have been involved in drug dealing or organised crime and they sought to reassure the general public. There was no mention of any corrosive substances actually being used in attacks in the city.
Cambridge is a generally safe city but we do have our share of serious violent crime and I think we all do have to pay attention to what’s going on in our city and try to understand what’s happening and do what we can to prevent crime related injuries and deaths.
The police did not mention the carrying of strong acids and alkalies as weapons in their written report to the meeting.
52 responses to “Cambridge Criminals Carrying Acid and Ammonia Say Police”
Earlier an officer had told the meeting that 5% of Cambridge’s secondary school pupils had said they’d been threatened with a weapon within the last month:
Sounds incredible. Astonishing. Awful.
I followed this up with a question at the West-Central Area Committee later that day on the 18th of July. The police said there have been three ammonia attacks in Cambridge, and said there were no lasting injuries as a result.
“We have had ammonia attacks in Cambridge over the last six months.”
“We have seen copy-cats in the city but not with acid, just with ammonia.”
“The immediate effects of having the ammonia thrown at your face is obviously it would affect your vision; there were no permanent lasting injuries as a result of those attacks.”