WHITE and Asian criminal gangs have been blamed for starting disturbances which wreaked havoc in Burnley.

As the Task Force reports back on problems facing the town and possible ways forward Crime Reporter Nick Evans looks at the involvement of drug dealing gangs.

The North West of England has the second highest rate of known problem drug use per head of population in England.

East Lancashire has the highest rate in the North West and Burnley has the highest rate in East Lancashire.

There are an estimated 4.2 drug users per 1,000 population in East Lancashire, higher than than any other area in the region except Liverpool.

It is these high levels that are at the root of many of the town's problems, especially in crime with up to 80 per cent of burglaries attributed to heroin dependency. About 50 per cent of recorded crime in Burnley from June 2000 to July 2001 was so-called "acquisitive crime" like burglary, fraud and theft.

In fact despite the disturbances of the summer it is burglary rather than disorder which has been identified as Burnley's biggest single crime issue with the town's burglary rate easily the highest in the county accounting for 25 per cent of house break-ins in the whole of Lancashire.

However the buying and selling of drugs brings with it lower thresholds for violent behaviour. Dealers will use almost any means to protect lucrative markets and resort to violence as a means of debt collection or to ward off anyone muscling in on territory.

The two groups who clashed in Daneshouse early on June 23 were believed to have been involved in a turf war over drugs. Police said the groups, one white and one Asian, were well known to one another and had a history of violent confrontations.

The relationship was said to be a "significant factor" in the clash and an "important factor" in the subsequent disorder. Police have stressed that drug dealing and the crime that goes with it affects both white and Asian communities in equal measure.

Inspector John Clucas, of Burnley Police, said although the town had a problem with drugs, ranging from cannabis to hard drugs like heroin, the criminality had not reached the same scale as places like Manchester.

He added: "We have a number of initiatives aimed at tackling different levels of dealing. Schemes such as Burnley Residents Against Drugs have been very useful and thanks to intelligence provided we have made a number of very significant arrests in the last three or four months of people who you could call premier league dealers, that is people who are importing drugs into the country. Hopefully this will have disrupted the trade.

"Obviously there are feuds between dealers, much of which goes unreported to police for obvious reasons but in Burnley we are nowhere near the scale of places like Manchester where drugs problems have escalated to the scale where firearms are used on a regular basis and you get violent assaults." The picture of how violent drug dealing can be, however, was brutally demonstrated by the shotgun murder of Burnley drug dealer Iain McKay in September last year.

The small time dealer and bootlegger, was taken to a remote car park in Netherwood Road and shot in the back of the head after being forced to kneel on the ground with his hands crossed over his chest -- a familiar pose in execution style slayings. During the police investigation police uncovered a trail of bootlegging, racism, football related violence, drug dealing and prostitution. The same issues, bar prostitution, were highlighted as causes of the Burnley disorder.

McKay was also a convicted football hooligan and a regular drinker in pubs in the Duke Bar area of the town, which featured throughout the trouble of the summer.

The task force report said that McKay's murder came as a result of a dispute between rival drug dealers -- the same cause it gives for the disorder -- and says that although racial conflict between the killer and victim was never proven it existed in both their associates.

Police have identified drug dealing as a "linked issue" to the disorder of June 23 to 26. Although it may have been cited as a short-term cause of the trouble by both the police and residents -- 44 per cent of people who replied to a task force questionnaire said drink or drugs were an important cause of the violence -- there is little doubt that drug dealing is also a long-term social problem for the town to tackle.