County Lines: Criminal Networks and Evolving Drug Markets in Britain

By Robert McLean, Grace Robinson and James A. Densley

This brief sheds light on evolving drug markets and the county lines phenomenon in the British context. Drawing upon empirical research gathered in the field between 2012-2019 across two sites, Scotland’s West Coast and Merseyside in England, this book adopts a grounded approach to the drug supply model, detailing how drugs are purchased, sold and distributed at every level of the supply chain at both sites. 
The authors conducted interviews with practitioners, offenders, ex-offenders and those members of the general public most effected by organised crime. The research explores how drug markets have continued to evolve, accumulating in the phenomenon that is county lines. It explores how such behavior has gradually become ever more intertwined with other forms of organised criminal activity.
Useful for researchers, policy makers, and law enforcement officials, this brief recommends a rethinking of current reactive policing strategies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030333621

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. McLean et al.County LinesSpringerBriefs in Criminologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33362-1_1

1. Introduction

Robert McLean¹ , Grace Robinson² and James A. Densley³

(1)

Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK

(2)

Criminology, Blackpool and the Fylde College, Lancashire, UK

(3)

Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Education Center, Metropolitan State University, Brooklyn Park, MN, USA

This is a book about human agency and exploitation in illicit drugs markets, told through the voices and experiences of drug market actors. Illicit drugs are big business and an even bigger public health problem (Stevens 2011). Drug addiction has changed or claimed countless lives. The global war on drugs has transformed criminal justice systems and the social fabric of communities. Drug money has bankrolled armed conflict, terrorism, political campaigns and revolutions. And, in some contexts, the illegal drug economy is the only economy that matters.

Drugs are a global phenomenon, but there is still much to learn about illicit drug markets. This is largely due to their continual evolving nature and the large cast of characters involved, from drug dealers to drug users, and so on. Despite a vast literature on drug supply and demand, a number of questions remain unanswered. How are local, regional and national drug markets organised? How do largely independent markets interlock with one another? How and by whom are drugs supplied? How much money can be made from dealing drugs? What drugs are most common and most profitable? How do the actors involved behave according to their given context, situation, and circumstance? Are supply models static or do they change and evolve? How should we, as a society, respond?

The Home Office has estimated Britain’s illegal drugs market to be worth £5 billion and the National Crime Agency says that drug trafficking to the UK costs an estimated £10 billion per year in social and economic harms. Drug harms in some parts of Britain, such as Scotland, are amongst the highest in the western world and drug supply is now the most prevalent form of organised crime (OC) in the country; with more people dying from OC than terrorism each year in Britain. Add to this, concerns about an evolving drug supply model in Britain and it is important that a book such as this is accessible to the widest possible audience. The style and content of the book have been tailored accordingly. Unfortunately, no one book can cover all aspects of the worldwide drugs trade, but one book can bring a local perspective to a global problem, with implications for researchers, practitioners (including police), and policy-makers at home and abroad.

The purpose of this book is to explore the illegal drugs market within contemporary Britain, drawing on ethnographic research from two case sites: Glasgow and West Scotland and Merseyside, England. Specifically, we are guided by three main objectives:

1.

Illuminate aspects of the illegal drugs market where gangs and OC are most active

2.

Explore the evolution of drug supply markets in Britain

3.

Examine the lived experienced of County Lines drug dealing

The first step to achieving these aims is defining the key concepts at the heart of them.

Gangs and Organized Crime

The term ‘gang’ is highly contested, particularly in the context of multisite research. However, the Eurogang definition was developed precisely for this purpose (Esbensen and Maxson 2018):

A street gang (or troublesome youth group corresponding to a street gang elsewhere) is any durable, street-oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of its group identity.

The Eurogang definition is a consensus rather than a unanimous statement and we acknowledge its limitations (for a discussion see Curry 2015), but it allows for us to classify and distinguish the social groups discussed herein. All groups described as gangs in this book meet this general standard, and they all see themselves or are seen by others to be a gang. In this book, we focus squarely on what the gang actually does. For example, the sale of illicit drugs and the criminal exploitation of children and young people to do so. Such a focus allows us to better understand the gang’s relationship with organised crime—a topic that has received some scholarly attention in recent years (Bouchard and Spindler 2010; Decker et al. 1998, 2008; Decker and Pyrooz 2013; Densley 2014; McLean 2018; Klein and Maxson 2006).

OC is an equally contested concept (Varese 2010). Legal definitions vary across countries, and often seem simplistic. The European Union adheres to the UNODC (2000) guidance that OC involves more than one person, is organised, (i.e., involves control, planning and use of specialist resources), causes significant harm to others, and benefits the individuals involved, typically financially. But is organised crime an activity or an organisation? Von Lampe (2016: 74) identifies three main categories of OC activity: (a) market-based crimes pertaining to the provision of illegal goods and services; (b) predatory crimes, which entail the exploitation of others; and (c) illegal-governance crimes, that involve the exercise of power to regulate the behaviour of subordinates. As outlined in this book, drug supply networks comprise all three elements.

Further, Campana and Varese (2018) have operationalised the third category, extra-legal governance, based on three measures: (1) the ability of an OC group to generate fear in a community; (2) its ability to coerce legal businesses; and (3) its ability to influence official figures. They argue that illegal governance clusters in ‘less affluent, deprived areas and neighbourhoods’ that are characterised by a ‘lack of trust in legitimate institutions’. Precisely the type of areas and neighbourhoods in which the fieldwork for this book was conducted.

County Lines

County Lines is a term used by the police to describe a growing practice among criminal gangs: when demand for drugs fails to meet the supply in major cities, gangs travel to remote rural areas, market towns or coastal locations in search of new customers (Andell and Pitts 2018; Coomber and Moyle 2018; Robinson et al. 2019; Spicer 2018; Whittaker et al. 2019). County Lines, described as ‘going country’ or ‘going OT’ (out there) by those involved in the practice (Daly 2017; Storrod and Densley 2017), is the process whereby:

A [criminal] group … establishes a network between an urban hub and county location, into which drugs … are supplied. A branded mobile phone line is established … to which orders are placed by introduced customers … the group exploits young or vulnerable persons … [who] regularly travel between the urban hub and the county market, to replenish stock and deliver cash … the group is inclined to use intimidation, violence and weapons including knives, corrosives and firearms. (National Crime Agency 2017: 2)

Drawing on responses from 43 territorial police forces across England and Wales, County Lines activity was reported in 88% of force territories, with 81% of forces having evidence of importing and 30% exporting by County Lines, according to the National Crime Agency (2017).

As drug markets expand or contract, drug supply networks evolve. From the 1980s to the present day, Class A drugs,¹ such as crack cocaine and heroin, have flooded traditionally working-class communities in Britain, devastating them in the process. Drug dealers have long commuted from major urban areas to provincial areas in order to sell (Windle and Briggs 2015), and as early as 2012, Densley (2014: 533) warned about senior gang members employing young people to work their ‘drugs line’ by sending them out ‘on assignment’ outside of London to explore ‘new markets’. But the relative saturation of Class A drug markets in Britain’s major cities (Windle and Briggs 2015), has meant that drug supply networks are increasingly setting up retail operations in smaller satellite locations, miles from their native urban hubs, where drugs markets are less well established.

Technology is the central organising feature of the County Lines business model because drugs are sold remotely over a network of dedicated mobile phone lines (Densley 2014; Storrod and Densley 2017). Cellular phones and messaging applications with end-to-end encryption create physical distance between drug dealers and drug transactions, reducing the risk of detection from law enforcement. The phone line is governed by a main drug dealer, who is able to remain in his or her hometown, whereas the commuters and ‘runners’ who service the drugs line are provided with temporary pay-as-you-go phones. Customers in the local market place orders with their drug dealer back in the hub city, and a simple phone call (or text message) is made from the drug dealer to their locally-based runner, informing them what the customer wants and when and where the transaction will take place—24 h[our] Dial-A–Deal delivery to your front door (Densley et al. 2018: 118). The National Crime Agency (NCA 2019) estimates there are over 1000 branded County Lines telephone numbers in the UK, governed predominantly by criminal networks in major urban cities.

Initially drawn to drug dealing by mythologised financial and social incentives, everyone from local, criminally embedded ‘hard-men’ to vulnerable youth in crisis have entered into the County Lines economy either by choice or circumstance. Systemic violence has followed because illicit markets, by definition, cannot be regulated by contracts and courts (Reuter 2009). Tackling County Lines is now part of HM Government’s (2018) ‘serious violence strategy’, which is concerned above all with reversing increases in knife crime, which rose to record levels in 2017–18, including 285 fatal stabbings—the highest number since Home Office records began in 1946. In 2018, the Government launched a £3.6 million National County Lines Coordination Centre to measure the threat of County Lines, focus resources on the most serious offenders, and work closely with partners in health, welfare, and education to reduce the harms associated with the practice. NCA (2019) threat assessments have since linked County Lines with increases in gun and knife crime in rural settings, the expansion of gangs and OC outside of urban centres, and a shift in the methodology of modern slavery to include coercive control and exploitation of vulnerable populations for the purposes of drug dealing.

Illicit Drugs Market

Illicit drugs do not emanate from West Scotland or Merseyside. Britain is predominantly an end-user of drugs, except for cannabis which is also locally produced. Drugs end up here because Britain is a large and lucrative target market. Heroin arrives overland from the opium fields of Afghanistan, through Turkey and the Balkans, or in some cases is transhipped via boat or air from Pakistan. Cocaine comes from South America via Jamaica, North Africa, and Spain (Crawford et al. 2018; UNODC 2016). Hence why drug markets typically are compartmentalised into international (importation), national/regional (wholesale or middle market), and local (retail) levels (Lupton et al. 2002; Matrix Knowledge Group 2007).

Illicit drug markets come in various shapes and sizes and supply practices (organisational or transactional) fluctuate by location (Coomber and Moyle 2018). It is widely accepted that there is not one UK drug market, but a variety of local and regional markets that intertwine loosely with each other (Pearson et al. 2001). Also well documented is that the country’s major cities, from London to Birmingham, Manchester to Liverpool, act as supply ‘hubs’ (NCA 2016), servicing smaller cities and towns with large quantities of drugs for established distributers to sell on to retail level sellers in their own locales (Matrix Knowledge Group 2007). Local retail markets may be open, semi-open (e.g., pub and club-based) or closed and trust-based (May and Hough 2004). Either way, drugs are consistently sourced from the same few urban cities in the UK.

The kilogram remains the most common wholesale trading weight for all solid and powder drugs, with the exception of crack cocaine, which is packaged following domestic conversion; an ounce (28 g) being the most common trading unit for this substance at wholesale (Crawford et al. 2018). A kilo of heroin costs about £23,000 at wholesale, about £10,000 less than cocaine. On the street, heroin and crack cocaine are commonly sold in ‘bags’ and ‘rocks’, respectively, in 0.1 g and 0.2 g amounts. Alas, an ounce of crack is capable of making approximately 280 × 0.1 g ‘rocks’, which retail for as little as £5–10.

Throughout this book, reference is made to illicit drug markets (IDM), meaning simply a sphere of activity in which interaction between certain buyers and sellers of drugs can come together. Such interaction occurs at various levels of the supply chain. Therefore, while we use IDM to refer to the illegal economy in which drugs are distributed holistically, we shall occasionally apply the prefix ‘local’, ‘regional’, or ‘national’ to indicate such activity at particular levels of interaction. In addition, when applying a market model, it helps to