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Police were warned last year that drug lords operating in the area were 'criminalising' children by recruiting them to deliver drugs on bicycles and do the 'last mile' of the drug trade...
Liverpool city centre is considered the drug crime capital of the United Kingdom, where ruthless local gangsters control the drug trade.
According to MailOnline, 359 drug-related crimes were detected in the city centre last year.
Coming in second place is Brownlow Hill, a neighbourhood adjacent to Liverpool city centre and close to the University of Liverpool and John Moores campuses. It had a crime rate of 296 per 1,000.
Albanian gangs dominate the drugs market in Britain, with kingpins from the Balkan state having forged direct relationships with Colombian cartels to distribute cocaine on the city's streets.
But the drug trade in Liverpool remains in the hands of local criminals, who have forged strong ties with their communities and a fearsome reputation that may have scared off Albanian crooks looking for a quick profit.
A legal document leaked by the Home Office last year described Albanian criminal gangs as an 'acute threat' to the UK and 'very prevalent in serious and organised crime' in Britain, including several murders.
Research by the National Crime Agency (NCA) has revealed that Albanian organised crime groups dominate the UK cocaine market worth £5 billion a year across the UK's major city and suburban areas, excluding Merseyside.
In 2023, the NCA and 43 forces across England and Wales targeted 'Western Balkans' gangs, seizing around 200,000 cannabis plants worth up to £130m, £636,000 in cash, 26kg of cocaine worth up to £1m and 20 firearms.
Outside Liverpool, Leicester Square and Covent Garden in Central London have the third highest rate at 235 per 1,000 residents.
They are followed by Halifax city centre (a rate of 162) and Bradford city centre (161).
Police were warned last year that drug lords operating in the area were 'criminalising' children by recruiting them to distribute drugs on bicycles and do the 'last mile' of the drug trade.
Also in the top 20 are Birmingham New Street, the centre of Derby and the London neighbourhood of St Paul's Cathedral and Oxford Street, which MailOnline revealed last week as the country's burglary capital.
The drug trade in the West Midlands capital is largely controlled by Pakistani heroin traffickers, who import the Class A drug that is destroying life in the city.
The Pakistanis have a strong hold on the heroin trade, so much so that Albanian organised crime groups tend not to get involved with heroin, which is quite unique. 'If you go to Luton, Bradford and Huddersfield, you will also see a strong element of heroin distribution.'
Arfan Mirza, a 42-year-old man from Birmingham, was convicted in 2023 of smuggling heroin worth £22 million in boxes of plastic carrier bags through UK airports.
Last year, West Midlands Police dismantled one of Britain's biggest drug trafficking gangs, which earned £1.2 million a year.
A dozen gangsters were sentenced to more than 100 years between them for running an organized crime group that sold large amounts of heroin and cocaine. /Adapted from Pamphlet/
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