A fresh crackdown on county lines drug dealing has resulted in police in London bringing 1,000 charges in just over a year, the Metropolitan police has said.
The successes were the result of new tactics and the coronavirus lockdown prompting criminals to switch to riskier tactics, because child drug runners travelling from the capital could no longer blend into the crowd on busy trains and coaches.
Country lines is a model of distributing drugs, sending them from bigger cities to smaller towns and rural areas. Users call a mobile phone and order their drugs. Drug dealers often believe the use of anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile phones, which do not have to be registered, protects them from detection.
But a senior officer revealed that police had been able to track the devices being used, seize them and get such good evidence of who was using the phone and when – by extracting communications data stored on the device – that they were able to bring hundreds of charges.
Deputy assistant commissioner Graham McNulty told the Guardian that the Met had reversed the sense of impunity that county lines dealers had felt: “We have not seen a change like this in such a short time.”
Between November 2019 and January 2021, the Met had brought over 1,000 charges against county lines dealers and their associates.
More than nine in 10 people arrested in the crackdown had pleaded guilty without a need to go to full trial: “When we only go through the front door we get the individual, the phone and the charge, there is no bail,” McNulty said.
The new tactics involve forces based where the exporters of drugs are located, and those where the drugs are sent, working together to track dealers who thought they were anonymous, but are trapped by their pay-as-you-go mobiles.
Police have used modern slavery and trafficking laws against dealers who have targeted children and the vulnerable, with some as young as 14 years old. Police have brought prosecutions against them without needing the cooperation of those pressed into drug dealing, so-called “victimless prosecutions”.
McNulty said:“They are buying trainers, taking children for a meal, buying a phone, posing as their friend, but really it is just manipulation.”
Police revealed Covid lockdowns had meant the youths who crisscrossed the county on usually crowded trains and coaches, now stood out, meaning dealers had changed tactics.
McNulty said: “With Covid, the use of coaches and trains has stopped. In the last year we have seen more of a move to cars with older people.” These are then easier to track using automatic number plate recognition.
The Met said that between 1 November 2019 and 31 January 2021 a total of 587 county line dealers and their associates were charged with 1,135 offences including conspiracy to supply, possession with intent to supply and supply of class A drugs.
The successes so far are against smaller dealers. Met commissioner Cressida Dick vowed to go after the major importers and drugs barons: “Alongside our work to tackle county lines and lower level supply, we remain focused on disrupting those higher up the chain and responsible for the widespread distribution of substances across the UK.”