Getting Started: ‘Put Me On, Bruv’

This chapter assesses the question of who joins a county line. Where do they come from? Why do they join? The chapter considers the concept of the Pool of Availability. The Pool of Availability comprises young people who have grown up in marginalised, vulnerable communities, and through a combination of habitus, social field, and social environment are now readily available and even conditioned to step into the street gang. Where street gangs become the logical answer to the prevailing conditions, the youth who affiliate to gangs do so as ‘rational agents’ joining ‘rational organisations’. The chapter offers case study insights from respondents articulating their lived experience of involvement and life inside a county line. It explores options for entry and types of role alongside the prerequisites for joining a county line crew, managing a line, and the logistics of getting staff to customers.

Grinding

This chapter examines how the actual processes of county lines drug-supply networks work in reality, looking at the internal dynamics of running a county line in more detail. The daily chore of wrapping drugs, bagging them, taking phone calls, delivering drugs to user, 27/7 from a local dealing hub or trap house is referred to by the runner/dealers as ‘grinding’. The chapter then reveals life inside a trap house, managing staff, role differentiation, and the marketing principles of customer relationship management. It also outlines the management risks of county lines, as well as the options for county line expansion. County line managers know that the initial stages of line establishment are crucial and misjudgements now are costly later. A skilled county line manager must therefore mitigate all risks, and establish and secure lines to commence profitable returns. Early risks here include retaliation from an existing/rival lines; over-exposure of marketing generating police activity; failure to create a market share; and transposing profits back to the parent gang.

A Changed Landscape?

This chapter traces the emergence of county lines, noting operational and cultural shifts in drug supply and distribution. Over the past several years, the evolution of UK drug markets has gathered national attention from the government, media, and public. This has centred upon the emerging development and expansion of drug distribution and supply networks from urban centres to provincial towns — in a process known as ‘running county lines’. This shift has been facilitated by advances in technology, that is, mobile phones. Technological advance has profoundly altered transactional practice for ordering, supplying, and distributing illegal drugs. The chapter then looks at the principle of flux and turbulence in the social field of the gang before considering county lines via the prism of marketing, business enterprise, and entrepreneurialism. It centres county lines within a transactional framework of customer relationship management and business decisions, and establishes the central premise of building competitive advantage.

Emergence and Change

This chapter discusses why and how county lines drug-supply networks began to emerge in provincial towns across the United Kingdom. It sets out several pre-conditions (variables) which, once ripened, led to the creation of county lines drug-supply networks as they are now known. The chapter also details how street gangs have evolved, leading the social field of the urban street gang into a state of flux. Contributing to this flux are new affiliates with new aspirations to seek out and create competitive advantage by locating and exploiting dormant domestic drug markets in new locations. The chapter then outlines the push–pull factors which make a county line host location attractive. It establishes the Evolutionary Models of CL Networks, creating a typology of different UK county line models increasingly adopting business modes of professionalisation and sophistication.

Ripples, Reverberations and Responses

This chapter focuses on the families of those involved in county lines, looking at how violence and intimidation often reverberates back into families. Familial reverberations occur when issues arising from criminal activity, or proximity to it, return to impact upon the domestic situation or wider family. Commonly this occurs due to: unpaid debts; teaching people ‘a lesson’; revenge; intimidation; demonstration of power; and as proxy method of reaching a gang-affiliate not personally locatable. In this way, the physical violence is transferred by proxy to other family members as a substitute. The type of familial reverberation depends upon: the principal target; trigger motivation; role of target; and relationship to urban street gang. The chapter then explores the range of potential responses available to local youth once a county line emerges in their town, noting emergence can offer either opportunity or threat. It also offers a spectrum of local adaptations employed by local youth before establishing a new theory of asymmetric clash and the gang Sprouting model — both detailing how county line emergence can dramatically impact host locations generating violence and fear.

Controlling the Line: Exploitation and Sanctions

This chapter investigates how county line managers employ strategic and tactical actions to control their lines to keep them active and thriving: first, through exploitation and; second, via the County Line Control Repertoire, which provides multiple tactical sanctions for county line operatives to control the line. Exploitation by street gangs and organised crime networks is UK-wide. Within county lines, exploitation of both adults and young people is fundamental to all county line business models and is essential to achieving the profit margins making county line models a profitable enterprise. Child criminal exploitation within county lines can include grooming and selection, recruitment, running drug lines, interlay carrying drugs, hiding or carrying weapons, and money laundering. The chapter then considers the role of gender, with detailed insight into the exploitation, intimidation, and violence now ever-present in county lines via issues such as debt bondage.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reflects on the unique contributions offered by the study while drawing out the key learning. As the study illustrates, it is clear that in the United Kingdom, the social fields of the urban street gang and of drug distribution markets, and the actors involved in each, are rapidly evolving and changing. It is now important to consider, through wider research, how the relational boundaries of these social fields are interacting with the social field of organised crime. This study, and others, report a blurring of these lines and morphing of criminal activity that was once more clearly defined. New interpretive models are needed to explore these relational social field boundaries which are shifting, dynamic, temporal, and situational. Only once one fully understands this new landscape can one begin to comprehend its new challenges and then address its morbid symptoms.

Introduction

This introductory chapter describes how the research study was conducted, detailing the number, type, and characteristics of the various respondents. The research study examines how London-based urban street gangs establish county line drug-supply networks into the Home Counties. It draws upon two principle theoretical perspectives with great explanatory value regarding street-gang dynamics: social field analysis and street capital theory. Active participants in county lines were interviewed in one-to-one qualitative interviews, shorter street-based interviews, or short focus groups. All were aged over 16 years old and the study acknowledged their status as victim, offender, or both. The chapter then explores the methodological challenges of the research, including ethics, limitations, negotiating access, and the usefulness of participant observation.

Cuckooing and Nuanced Dealing Relationships

This chapter evaluates the complex set of inter-personal relationships between the user community and county line operatives, starting with cuckooing and the development of a cuckooing typology. Cuckooing is not new, but for years remained ‘hidden’ within housing or policing reports of ‘crack dens’, largely overlooked or unrecognised as criminal exploitation and downplayed as a ‘type of manipulation’. Essentially, it is a form of criminal exploitation where vulnerable people are conned, coerced, controlled, or intimidated into sharing, providing, or offering up their accommodation to criminals (often drug dealers) who then use it to base their criminal activity (often drug dealing). Methods vary; however, intimidation and violence often underpin this. It is now widely associated with county line networks. The chapter then considers the views of both users and dealers as they offer insights into their often complex relationships and how they feel about county lines.