By Open Door Correspondent “Bernie”
If I mentioned the words “County Lines” to you, what image would it conjure up? For me, it would be a romanticised old memory of watching a film, probably set in America, featuring a well-known actor with an unfeasibly large moustache, driving a very fast car over a state line with the Highway Patrol Officers from one state taking over from the Officers of the previous state as they went in hot pursuit of our gallant and hirsute hero.
But alas, nearly 20 years into the 21st century it isn’t quite such a romantic notion. “County Lines” is the name given to the way drugs such as Xanax, about which I have written previously, are now distributed around the UK. Previously, most towns had their own local dealers, who controlled the supply in their own area. Every so often, they’d drive to a nearby city to replenish their stocks and head back home to redistribute it. But there seems to have been a shift in the way supplies are distributed around the country, and at the middle of it all is London. From there, a network of supply lines radiates out across the UK, with the London dealers using their own people to deal directly with the consumers around the country. Sometimes they will set up a “hub” in another large city (Liverpool and Manchester are two well known examples) and create secondary county lines from them.
The Government is well aware of the problem, and published a report at the end of 2017 that created a formal link between county lines, violence, and exploitation. Significantly, the second key finding of the National Crime Agency investigation was: -
“County lines groups impose high levels of violence, including the prevalent use of weapons and firearms to intimidate and control members of the group and associated victims.”
Of course, the link between drugs and addiction is well-proven. But we’ve recently seen a spike in the levels of violent crime, particularly in London. Across England and Wales, knife crime rose by 22% in 2017, the largest rise ever recorded. An article in The Independent in April 2018 paints a bleak picture, with 60 murders in London alone since the start of this year. Although not all are attributed to rival drugs gangs fighting for the market, there is a worrying upwards trend. The Guardian published an article in April this year, using Home Office figures, which showed that murders where either the victim or the suspect were using or dealing drugs rose from 50% to 57% between 2014-15 and 2016-17. That’s a huge increase in anyone’s book. But I should stress that these figures are only for murders involving drugs, and data for offences other than murder and which involve drugs, aren’t available. In 2016/2017 there were 34,700 reported offences involving a knife. It’s an interesting question to wonder how many of these involved drugs. If we use the percentage increase in drug-related murders between 2014 and 2017 , it could be as many as nearly 20,000.
Crack cocaine is the main culprit behind these drug-related deaths, but heroin is also starting to appear more regularly on UK streets too, and the UK is the second largest Xanax market after the USA. During the same period (2014 to 2017) the number of Police Officers on our streets has been steadily declining, meaning there are fewer officers now not just to catch the murderers, but also the drug dealers whose activities provide the motive. It’s a double whammy.
Extra funding for additional officers is of course one solution, but places like Youth Clubs and sports centres might also be considered for an increased share of the Treasury’s coffers. With children as young as 13 being reported as involved in knife crime, it would seem vitally important to give our teenagers a safer place to go other than street corners and burger bars, where they are more likely to fall victim to gang leaders and drug dealers.
The Scottish Government and Police Scotland are leading the field in reducing gang crime. In 2008 they set up the Violence Reduction Unit which aimed to reduce violent crime, and in particular knife crime. In the ten years to date they have achieved a commendable reduction of 50%, and in the same period, knife crime in Glasgow, once known as the murder capital of the UK, has fallen by 62%. Drug possession crime figures for 2008 aren’t available, but for the three year period between 2014 and 2017, arrests for possession or dealing of drugs fell by 12.2%. Although there is no official correlation between the reduction in knife crime and the reduction in arrests for possession and dealing, it is hard to imagine the two are not related.
It’s easy to believe, as a drug user, and particularly when in active addiction to drugs, that the only harm we’re doing is to ourselves. We know our dealer, we see them often, and we see that they’re okay, they’re not coming to any harm. But the link between drugs, the suppliers of them, and the violence that exists between rival suppliers, is a proven one and as London this year has shown, violent crime is on the increase.