We continue an end of year series of articles reflecting on 2020, which was about so much more than the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, the very fact that crimes and wrongs carried on, despite the virus and the government-imposed restrictions, showed how intractable such problems as county lines drug dealing are.
Illegal drugs are hardly new; and while the wish that drugs do not happen to nice people in nice places has never been true, it’s even less true in the new turn that drugs networks have taken in recent years – to ‘county lines’, whereby, as outlined for instance at the autumn 2018 conference of the Security Institute, city-based gangs exploit typically young and groomed people to carry drugs to small towns, working and selling through mobile phones.
As CEO of Resilience UnLimited, Jonathan Green, says; children, as young as primary school age, have been targeted to store and deliver drugs, weapons, and profits from County Lines drug deals, with the promise of a share of those profits. However, the reality is often very different. The National Centre for Gang Research (NCGR), based at the University of West London (UWL) recently reported that with Resilience UnLimited it will support the Forest Green Rovers Football Club and Community Trust, to raise awareness of the dangers facing children in Gloucestershire.
Drug dealing besides a crime is a social harm; those young people, often vulnerable, may be treated as victims of ‘modern slavery. To give only one example from local government, Croydon Council’s anti-social behaviour officers have been securing a number of Premises Closure Orders (PCOs). Offensive behaviour including fighting, vandalism, arguing, ringing residents’ buzzers and frequent visitors to the property at various times of the night and early hours. One PCO covers a vulnerable tenant allowing only the tenant to live in the property. Cuckooing is a practice where people take over a person’s home and use the property to facilitate exploitation.
As for drug addicts, at risk of harming themselves, Police Scotland is trialling frontline officers in three areas voluntarily carrying and administering the antidote nasal spray as an emergency first aid response to opioid overdose.
Newton Abbot is a small Devon town on the road to seaside resorts. Last year a group of up to 30 young people were at serious risk of becoming involved in gangs, drug dealing and violence, say Devon and Cornwall Police, who issued adult and youth civil gang injunctions against 11 youths. That meant they were unable to visit named places, meet with named people or act in a threatening way over social media.
A year in to the project, before the pandemic, crime figures for Newton Abbot showed a 4.2pc reduction in violence with injury, 15.8pc reduction in robbery, 9.8pc reduction in criminal damage, 12.4pc reduction in public order offences and 19.5pc reduction in possession of weapons. It was the first time a piece of civil legislation had been used to address gang related behaviour in the south west region. A new scheme to continue that work is being funded for four years by the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly; the aim, preventing serious violence that comes with illegal drugs. Some £225,000 a year for the next four years (£900,000 in total) has been allocated so Turning Corners can continue with key elements of the project and protect and deter those who have the potential to get involved in violent and anti-social culture at an early stage.
As that suggests, illegal drugs drive much of the serious violence, exploitation and anti-social behaviour which blights communities. A sign of how adaptable those in the drugs trade are, in terms of ‘business model’ is featured in the December 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine; a nightclub in Coventry city centre, pictured, closed like other clubs ever since lockdown in March, was recently raided by police as it had been turned into a cannabis factory.
Bedfordshire Police, one of the smaller shire police forces, have spoken of ‘a significant challenge from organised crime’.
Some deeper than usual truths were spoken after the August visit by Home Office Policing Minister and Boris Johnson henchman from London mayoral days, Kit Malthouse, to Bedfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), Kathryn Holloway, and Chief Constable Garry Forsyth. Malthouse was there to share the success from Operation Boson – a specialist unit against gang, gun and knife crime, which was doubled after the PCC received ‘special grants’ of £4.514m and £3m respectively from the Home Office in the past two years. As that implies, like any operation, going after gangs properly takes more money than in the usual police force budget.
Also, the Home Office expects to see ‘results’ for ‘investment’; hence a stress on the quantifiable from Boson – 300 search warrants, arrested more than 400 suspects and seized 47 firearms, 23 imitation firearms, 1,252 rounds of viable ammunition, 7.3 kilos of Class A and 11.4 kilos of Class B drugs as well as more than £156,000 in cash.
Holloway made the case for Boson work to continue, and funding arrangements against it, and made plain that without continued police work, such crime crops up again, even in less obvious towns than the metropolitan cities, such as Luton. He said: “In the longer term, we need to come to a position where the particularly serious crime that is faced here counts for more than the overall number of crimes, which is what is currently rewarded by the central police funding mechanism. This would always mean that the largest metropolitan areas and police forces would gain most and those like our own would be penalised, simply as we also have large rural areas to police, with smaller populations.
“We would like nothing more than to receive special funding for two or three years and clear up organised crime once and for all but the value of drugs markets in particular, plus those involving human trafficking and the sex and weapons trade are a clear business opportunity for another group once we have dealt with the earlier threat. Crime will not stop but neither will the efforts of Bedfordshire Police which, despite its size – with less than 1,300 officers – has been racking up the results against such gangs in a way that would be the envy of far larger forces.”
A problem is that the harm due to drugs – fear of gangs, and more profoundly a breakdown in community, loss of faith in opportunity and social inclusion – by being not quantifiable, does not enter the Home Office calculations.
