Police! Police!
For the past five years or so,
even amid all the noise around coronavirus and Brexit,
one key issue has completely dominated crime,
policing, and drugs in the UK.
This is the story of how the war on drugs created a situation
in which children across Britain
are routinely and brutally exploited to sell crack and heroin.
This is the story of county lines.
-Police! -Police!
You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense
if you do not mention when questioned
something which you later rely on in court.
I’m on fire! And what?!
Everyone gets stabbed in Southend, bruv.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[County Lines]
In its most simple terms,
county lines refers to the practice of big-city organized crime groups
from places like London, Liverpool, or Birmingham
moving into smaller towns or even rural villages
and taking over their drug markets.
But drug dealers having to commute to sell their gear
is not what has captured the attention of British society;
it’s that the people running these operations day to day
are usually kids, often 15 or 16 years old,
and sometimes as young as 11 or 12.
I was 16 years old
when I first started getting involved with drug dealing and drug dealers.
At first, it started off as partying with them, having fun.
They had nice clothes, nice cars, money, all of it.
For me personally, I don’t remember saying,
“Yes, I want to hold drugs. Yes, I want to.”
I don’t remember saying anything like that.
It just went from, “Hey, can you hold this for me?
Hey, can you do this for me, can you do that favor for me?”
to now I’m a full-blown drug dealer myself.
Stories about county lines started exploding in the British press
from around 2015.
Police forces seemed completely unprepared
for this new type of drug dealing.
And the press jumped at the shock value
of the ages of the kids involved.
What this goes to show is just how behind the curve
police intelligence, politicians, and large sections of the media are
when it comes to drugs.
In fact, the roots of county lines dealing
actually go all the way back to the late 90s.
And UK MCs like Joe Black have been rapping about going country
since the mid 2000s.
The basic business model of county lines is pretty simple
and very grim.
Usually it’s the guy at the top in his 30s or late 20s,
and then you have the guy in the middle or the girl in the middle.
Their job is [to] reload and take people up and down
from London to wherever they are going to.
Then you have the ones at the bottom of the triangle,
which are the runners.
They’re usually very, very young,
and they’re the ones who are
most likely to suffer from the consequences,
you know, like police and other drug dealers’ rivalry.
It’s almost impossible to know
exactly how many people across the UK are involved in this trade.
One estimate from 2020 put the number as high as 50,000 kids
who are part of an illicit industry
that’s thought to generate upwards of 3 million pounds a day.
But the truth is, because of the nature of this sort of crime,
the authorities simply don’t know for sure.
And though the roots of county lines go back decades,
it’s been aggravated over the past ten years
by wider factors that have transformed British society.
I think what’s key here
is to situate county lines within the context of austerity politics,
which the government has been pursuing since 2010.
Growing levels of inequality, decrease in social mobility
have all meant that there are increasing numbers of young people,
particularly from poorer neighborhoods,
who are unable to access the legitimate labor markets
and to get the training and education opportunities
that they need to succeed in life.
It comes as no surprise that the illicit economy,
the drugs economy, would become a more attractive option to them.
I was a part of this life for a little over two years.
It’s like, “Work hard, keep grinding, and you’ll make a lot of money.
You’ll become successful. You’ll be this. You’ll be like me.
You’ll be a top dog like me.”
You know, “Here, take a few hundred quid,
go buy yourself a little tracksuit.”
They use that tactic on most of the kids.
And I realized that because I was so young and so vulnerable
and I was so impressionable
and I was ready to do whatever these people wanted me to do,
that's why they wanted to keep me around.
My mum kept calling the police on me.
You know, she was always crying on the phone and stuff like that,
so I feel like my family was suffering with me as well.
I shouldn’t have put them through that.
Most of it is outside of London.
I will go up there. Me or my buddy over there.
We’re going to find one crackhead.
Once the area is established, I’ll get kids to go up there for me.
Mainly from, like, 12 to 15, 16.
Pay them, like, 300 a week.
They need money. Mummy and daddy ain’t got no money.
So who do they come to? They come to uncle.
Uncle will send them out there.
Let them have a week, two weeks in boot camp.
I’ll go up there and might show them how it works.
You know, once they get the hang of it,
I’ll just let them be.
But what “letting them be”
actually means for organized crime groups
is exposing these kids to extreme danger from rival gangs
and often the customers themselves.
I’ve even witnessed countless stabbings.
A group of young men were coming out from different sides of the road,
and they went directly for my friend.
They were punching him.
But I didn’t know that the whole time they had blades in their hand...
and they punctured his lung.
I look and there’s blood everywhere,
so, you know, I’m crying
and I’m trying to get the ambulance to come.
When we went to the hospital,
the doctor was like, “He could have probably died in a few minutes.”
They stabbed him that many times.
It's hard to overstate just how vulnerable
and at risk these children are.
Organized crime use a variety of methods
to groom and manipulate children,
but there’s two very common instances.
One is where a child is given a load of drugs
and then robbed at knifepoint.
But what the child doesn’t realize is
it’s the people that gave them the drugs that have set that up.
Another common instance is sexualized blackmail.
The child, male or female, this has happened to both,
are filmed in sexually compromising situations.
They can be blackmailed in very intimidating
and terrifying ways
that keeps them really working as slave labor.
But it’s not just the fact that kids are easier to manipulate and exploit
that makes them attractive targets for organized crime groups.
Poverty and lack of opportunity may set the scene for county lines,
but that’s not what actually causes it.
For that, there’s another, even more important factor at work:
the war on drugs.
Police are really, really good at catching drug dealers,
but that is the problem.
I used to work undercover, infiltrating inner city gangs.
You know, I was at the front line
of the success of policing the drug markets.
Each operation would result in
people being in prison for over 100 years.
So gangs have adapted.
And the way that they've adapted is to use children
because children are the perfect buffer zone
between police and drug dealer.
It’s policy that’s created this.
As soon as you prohibited drugs,
it led to an inevitable path of children being exploited.
So he’s got loads of coke.
He’s got loads of individual deals.
That’s probably about it, I would imagine.
How much is that worth?
That’d be about 100 quid a deal.
As county lines dealing emerged into the national consciousness,
as far as the police were concerned, if they caught a kid selling drugs,
they'd caught a dealer.
So, thousands of kids who’d been targeted and groomed
specifically because they were already traumatized and vulnerable
were thrown into the criminal justice system
and ended up in prison.
I ended up getting a conspiracy to supply class A charge,
and I’ve done two years, four months in prison.
In recent years, there’s been some recognition
from some parts of the justice system
that what they’re actually dealing with
is a complex system of exploitation and manipulation;
that many of those arrested as perpetrators
are actually victims as well.
In 2019, a landmark case
used modern slavery legislation for the first time
to prosecute older gang members who had recruited, groomed,
and trafficked kids to sell drugs.
There’s drug paraphernalia around the address.
So you are definitely going to be searched
under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
What he’s told us is he’s originally from Wales via Kent,
and now he finds himself in Great Yarmouth.
And he’s only been here for a short period of time,
and he can’t really give us an explanation.
County lines, for me really,
is a business model that’s based on exploiting people.
But there are still serious difficulties even here.
For starters, it’s generally much easier for the police
to build a drug dealing case than a human trafficking case.
And even when this law is applied,
there’s no guarantee that it’s providing the sort of protection
that the police and politicians often claim it is.
The Modern Slavery Act was not designed with this demographic
and this type of problem in mind.
The key problem here that I see is the difficulty that exists
in terms of drawing the legal as well as moral distinction
between perpetrators and victims.
Put simply, modern slaves can also become modern slave masters
and modern slave masters can become modern slaves.
And I’ve sat in cases where the same young person
was both being prosecuted for human trafficking offenses
while at the same time running the defense
that he was a modern slave himself for drugs charges.
But even amid this impossibly complex situation,
the biggest obstacle to actually dealing with this crisis
is that politicians still seem intent on beating the same old drums
of the war on drugs.
Across government, we all have a collective responsibility
to start to understand county lines,
but importantly, tackle county lines drugs.
The gangs, the perpetrator, the individuals,
and the organizations behind county lines
so we can quite literally cut the head of the snake
and get to the very root causes, the upstream causes
of why county lines has become such an issue in this country.
When I hear a home secretary talking about cutting the head off a snake,
it's just, oh, it's just painful
because it’s what home secretaries have been saying
for decades and decades.
But this isn’t a snake; it’s a hydra.
You cut the head off this and many grow back,
and they all start fighting with each other
because police never reduce the size of the market.
The big elephant in the room here,
when we talk about exploited kids being rescued,
is if you rescue a hundred kids,
that means another hundred kids get sucked into the whole thing
because the demand remains the same.
As long as there’s a demand, there will always be a supply.
And is there good demand?
Yeah, always. Anywhere, everywhere.
The commitment of British police and politicians to protect children
was also called into serious question in 2019
when it emerged that police were
actively recruiting kids involved in county lines
to become informants known as covert human intelligence sources,
exposing them to potentially dangerous situations.
The government has just pushed through a bill called the CHIS Bill,
which is police jargon for informants or police spy,
and this bill makes it easier for the police to recruit children.
Now, this is a direct response to county lines,
and it’s part of the fear of a political crisis
that county lines will inevitably bring.
As an undercover operative,
I experienced many near-death experiences,
and I'm now diagnosed with chronic PTSD.
That's something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life.
Children are going to be facing these same dangers.
And children are far more susceptible to mental health damage
than adults are.
Using kids as spies might show how desperate
the police are to crack down on county lines networks.
But to really understand county lines,
you also have to look in detail
at which drugs the gangs are actually selling
and who they’re selling to.
This child exploitation phenomenon is specifically servicing
one very narrow part of the drug markets,
and that’s the problematic heroin and crack cocaine market.
There are solutions.
If this was treated as a health issue, not a criminal one,
if those vulnerable people were looked after
by investment in their care,
this child exploitation would virtually disappear overnight.
Treatment services have been cut,
whereas investment in law enforcement has gone up,
and this is the wrong way round.
The exploitation of children
is a constant feature of the war on drugs,
from Mexico to Afghanistan.
It’s anyone’s guess as to why Britain’s leaders
thought the UK would be any different,
or why they thought their failing policies would succeed,
where across the world they’ve only ever made things worse.
But what we can probably say
is that if you support the continued prohibition of illicit drugs,
then you are supporting the continued exploitation of children,
not just in Britain but across the world.