On the Beat in Faliraki's Bar Street

The call to pluck Steven Jameson from the dance floor comes through at 11.45pm. By this time - after several beers around the swimming pool and on Bar Street - the Briton is well into Faliraki's infamous groove, flailing his tattooed arms around his closely cropped head. But there is concern that the Englishman's raucous behaviour might also be drug-induced.

The informant tells police chief Ethymios Kalamatas, who is patrolling Europe's notorious beach-and-booze citadel, that Mr Jameson has begun to upset other customers so he should be removed.

"Where is he?" asks the soft-spoken former traffic police officer, now heading the much-vaunted crackdown on alcohol-fuelled antics at the Rhodes resort.

"At Breeze on Bar Street," the undercover policeman says into his walkie-talkie.

Officer Kalamatas begins to stroll down the notorious neon-lit strip. On the way he passes the mini-skirted English girls gyrating on the pub counters, the boys sipping cocktails through long black straws, the British youths half-walking, half-stumbling past touts - also British - who beckon them with promises of "two [drinks] for one."

Mr Kalamatas surveys the hedonistic scene but he does not understand. He has never been to Britain and prior to Faliraki has never encountered "such excesses".

"Every time I see it, I'm shocked," he says. By the time he reaches Breeze he seems quite dazed.

Mr Jameson does not put up much of a fight. Instead it is other British tourists who complain that "they have come to spoil our evening".

Mr Jameson protests his innocence all the way to the police station in the nearby village of Archangelo, where officers search him for drugs. They find nothing.

Extreme measures

The swoop is typical of the many that Mr Kalamatas and his ten-member division have conducted following the murder of Paddy Doran last week. The teenager was allegedly slashed in the throat with a broken bottle by another British tourist during a nightclub brawl. Since then, measures to tame unruly British tourists have been stepped up in the resort.

Greece's tourism chief announced this week that the anything goes atmosphere encouraged by tour operators and local Greeks in popular holiday resorts nationwide is to be stopped. "The buck stops here," said Yiannis Patellis, who heads the Greek national tourism organisation. "[These incidents] show the degeneration of some British tourists."

In Faliraki, which attracts nearly 4% of Greece's 14 million tourists, the new measures start with preventative patrols such as the monitoring of sound levels in bars before the police direct their gaze on patrons and tour reps. No infringement is now too small.

"Often we take girls who are dressed inappropriately to their hotels to change," says Mr Kalamatas, whose great coup this week was the arrest of Jemma-Anne Gunning, the tourist fined £1,750 for baring her breasts in an impromptu competition. The Somerset teenager was one of six Britons to be hauled before the court in Rhodes and fined for indecent behaviour.

After midnight the riot police take over. "That's when the majority are picked up, usually for removing their clothes and displaying their bottoms in violation of article 337 of the penal code," says Mr Kalamatas drily.

More than 200 inebriated Britons have been made to take the trip to Archangelo in a police car this summer. Most do not leave the police station without spending at least two hours in a cell. The experience, says Mr Kalamatas, has the aim of "sobering them up".

"When we Greeks drink we get tipsy and a little merry. When the British drink they get blind drunk and violent," he says.

The Archelangelo cell has become symbolic of the increasingly explosive culture clash between rowdy British holidaymakers and conservative Greeks outraged by their lewd behaviour.

For a long time the boisterous behaviour was passed off as the exuberance of youth; the price the Greeks had to pay for inviting mass tourism into their country. But then the high-spirited antics turned to violence as tourists high on drink and drugs began running riot.

In Faliraki - where some taxi drivers now carry wooden clubs - locals say they daren't walk down Bar Street after 11pm for fear of being mobbed or "touched up".

"The only thing I am certain of," says Gorgios Argyrou, a store owner, "is the vomit and excrement that greets us every morning we open the shop.

"Last year the noise was so loud from the sound-system of the bar opposite that it dislodged my wife's pacemaker."

Binge drinking - encouraged by tour operators on organised pub-crawls that were banned this week - have been blamed for the unprecedented debauchery.

But Mark Jones, Club 18-30 area manager for Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, said local business owners had to accept that they were to blame too. "All the bar owners are Greek," he says. "It is not Club 18-30 who made Faliraki what it is. Young people are attracted to the bars and the clubs. The Greeks built these and our industry reacts to where people want to go.

"In a lot of ways it is very insulting to blame the companies, because they are bringing money into the resort and helping the businesses to be successful."

The Greeks are also now realising that they, too, have been complicit in attracting hooligan holidaymakers.

"We should have all done something about it long ago," says Lefteris Papaelthefriou, a local councillor. "We all knew that tour operators were on commission from bars and were making a killing. But we all went for cheap and easy money, and now we are paying the price."