A police chief has said stop-and-search is a “critical tool” for policing after concerns were raised about officers being too stretched to tackle drug-dealing in Greenwich.

Drug-dealing is a prominent issue for one ward councillor who grilled Greenwich’s police commander Chief Superintendent Simon Dobinson at a meeting.

Cllr Angela Cornforth, said residents in Plumstead were concerned that despite consistently reporting alleged drug-dealing, police were only “monitoring” situations rather than taking action.

The councillor said: “It’s just a worry, I don’t feel like I am doing my job properly. We keep reporting it and it’s just going on and on under our noses.”

In response, Ch Supt Dobinson said police had to focus on police priorities, and focussing on drugs would take resources from other issues.

He said: “You’ll never hear me say we don’t take open market drug-dealing seriously. We absolutely do. The reality is there is a lot of it and we have limited resources, and we have to prioritise accordingly.

“The priorities have been set, and we have to use resources as best we can.

“Officers do regularly stop and search people for drugs and arrest them. We do focus on those supplying drugs – we are not here to criminalise users where it’s a medical issue rather than criminal.

“The reality is we can continue to arrest people and focus on drug-dealing, but that would mean we wouldn’t be able to service other areas to the extent we do at the moment.”

Police forces across England and Wales had begun to reverse a long-term decline in the use of stop-and-search powers over a wave of stabbings and drug-related crimes.

The use of stop-and-search has been criticised for encouraging institutionalised racism, with stats showing members of the black and ethnic minority community are eight times as likely to be targeted.

Ch Supt Dobinson said: “The number of complaints for stop-and-search has dropped to an all-time low. That’s partly down to the use of body-worn video – that shows what police do and have always done, and that’s a professional stop-and-search.

“It remains a highly contentious issue but it is an absolutely critical tool in order to target those people carrying weapons or drugs or whatever it may be.

“We try and put police in the right place at the right time with the right intelligence. We lack community intelligence – what these people look like, what they drive, so it’s really important officers use their instinct for what looks suspicious.”

Drug offences have risen in Greenwich in the last three months, but remain largely below the capital’s average.

There have been 509 reports of possession of drugs so far this year, compared to 514 and 477 in the last two years respectively.