Policing County Lines: Responses To Evolving Provincial Drug Markets by Jack Spicer

Author:Jack Spicer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030541934
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

A further example of this interplay between instrumental and expressive motivations included acts or threats of violence deployed by ‘out-of-town’ dealers towards their local rivals when moving in to the area. Such incidents were presented by some officers as being illustrative of how the local drug market had changed dramatically due to the presence of these foreign and dangerous ‘gangland’ groups (Hallsworth 2013). However, as many went on to acknowledge, this was a typically short-term occurrence, with violence used instrumentally to intimidate and ensure compliance from local dealers in order to gain drug market dominance.

As McLean et al. (2019) have suggested, a reputation of ‘city dealers’ being dangerous and willing to use violence may reduce attempts by locals to respond violently to their presence. In the context of the local towns the officers worked in, if violence did subsequently occur, it was seemingly almost always related to enforcing drug debts as opposed to violent performances related to status. Despite the officers being initially keen to present serious incidents of violence related to County Lines as expressive and illustrative of sadistic tendencies fostered by gang culture, once discussed in detail, it was arguably more appropriate to interpret these events within the instrumental profit maximisation framing they had used to explain most other aspects of the ‘out-of-town’ dealer’s conduct. In addition to providing greater insight into the wider interplay between instrumental and expressive behaviour undertaken by those involved in County Lines (see Storrod and Densley 2017), this undermines the contention that such groups and their activities can be explained simply as products of gangs. As discussed in Chap. 2, this is backed up by traditionally ‘gang talk’-littered official publications, which recognise the diversity of the groups involved (NCA 2017).

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