INVESTIGATION: On the line - Whack-a-mole

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Story
Host: The Times
Episode: INVESTIGATION: On the Line – Whack-a-mole
Date: March 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the evolution of county lines drug operations in the UK—networks in which gangs exploit children and vulnerable people to distribute drugs across regions. The discussion reveals that despite persistent law enforcement efforts, criminal tactics are rapidly adapting. With key input from criminologists, police leaders, policymakers, and investigative journalists, the episode probes whether the latest strategies and upcoming legislation can effectively tackle the continually shifting landscape of county lines crime.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A New Landscape of County Lines Crime

• Opening Scene (01:34): The episode starts with a dawn police raid in Walsall on a county line known as “Frosty,” illustrating the typical law enforcement approach but hinting at deeper issues.
• Fragmentation & Change (04:21):
  • Dr. Mohammed Ruckman (Criminologist): Describes the shift from organized, family- or ethnically-based criminal groups to disorganized, diverse, and financially motivated clusters.
  • Quote:
    “We no longer have necessarily the big fishes. We now have clusters, smaller groups…happy to bump shoulders and work together for largely financial gain.” (Dr. Mohammed Ruckman, 05:48)
• Violence & Exploitation (05:10):
  • Violence has increased and become more indiscriminate, with former “unwritten rules” of the street no longer applying; children and vulnerable adults are frequent targets.

2. Scale and Scope: Alarming Statistics

• Growth in Numbers (06:15): County lines operations have exploded:
  • 2015: ~200 groups, 600 youth involved
  • 2026: >6,500 active lines, >14,000 children at risk
  • 1 in 9 kids aged 13–17 have been approached for criminal activity.
• Wider Exploitation (06:15):
  • Migrants in asylum hotels increasingly recruited as drug runners.

3. Political and Policing Response

• Policing Minister’s View (Sarah Jones, 07:28):
  • Aims to halve knife crime by targeting root causes connected to county lines.
  • Quote:
    “If we want to tackle knife crime at its root cause, you've got to get under the skin of what's going on with county lines.” (Sarah Jones, 07:28)
• National Police Service Model (08:21–09:53):
  • Push for a national, coordinated response using technology and data to unify strategy and intelligence.
  • Quote:
    “You embed this into the system so that everybody is following the evidence and joining up the dots.” (Sarah Jones, 09:14)

4. Front-Line Enforcement: A Game of Whack-a-mole

• Dan Mitchell (Head, National County Lines Coordination Centre, 10:00):

  • 8,871 lines shut, 27,000+ arrests since 2019; 13,500 people referred for safeguarding.
  • Admits the fundamental problem hasn’t gone away:
    Quote: “Over the last 2–3 years, we're seeing more county lines recorded than ever. So at the moment estimate, there's at least…7,000 county lines in operation nationally, which is a lot.” (Dan Mitchell, 10:56)

• Adaptation by Criminals (11:32):

  • Gangs localize operations, diversify drugs, and use encrypted apps/social media to avoid detection.
  • Quote:
    “When you knock one line down, another one starts in its place.” (David Wood, 11:12)

5. Shifting Drug Markets and Policing Focus

• From Cross-Region to Local Lines (12:04–13:39):

  • Localized operations reduce child trafficking but increase the range of drugs sold (more cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, ketamine).
  • Social media favours cannabis/“party drugs,” reaching more “affluent, middle-class” users.
  • Quote:
    “It's just a totally different market with a totally different arrest rate.” (Dan Mitchell, 14:46)

• Disparity in Prosecution Data (15:01–16:41):

  • Big increase in heroin supply convictions; sharp fall in cannabis and MDMA supply prosecutions, despite their rise in social media-driven trade.
  • Key Data:
    • Cannabis dealer sentences fell 37% (2016–2025)
    • MDMA possession with intent to supply fell 43% (2016–2025)
  • Quote:
    “The lack of police focus on this growing area is letting dealers move under the radar and they're getting away with it.” (George Willoughby, 16:44)

6. The Law Tries to Catch Up

• New Offences Proposed (21:08):

  • Legislation to make child criminal exploitation, “cuckooing” (criminals taking over vulnerable people’s homes), and “plugging” (forced internal drug concealment) new criminal offences, with penalties up to 10 years.
  • Quote:
    “It's going to be very clear that child criminal exploitation is an offence…much more simple…I think than the current modern slavery legislation.” (Dan Mitchell, 22:46)

• Concerns About Collateral Damage (23:21):

  • Safeguarding experts worry new laws might criminalize more young victims, as actions like “cuckooing” are often done by children pressured by adults.

• Policy-maker’s Dilemma (24:25):

  • Balancing support/intervention with consequences for youth offenders; question of where to draw the line between victim and perpetrator.
  • Quote:
    “These are often very vulnerable young people who are at the same time doing pretty horrific things. So there is a balance here, but there also has to be consequences.” (Sarah Jones, 24:25)

7. Expert Skepticism

• Limits of Legislation (26:14):
  • Dr. Mohammed Ruckman warns policy often lags behind — criminals adapt faster than government can legislate.
  • Quote:
    “The approach needs to be proactive...do this more so in real time so as to be able to mitigate this issue further.” (Dr. Mohammed Ruckman, 26:14)

8. Human Impact: Victims and the Cycle of Exploitation

• David Collins Reflects (27:03–33:24):
  • Describes how defining victim vs. perpetrator is fraught; some kids are prosecuted who might be better safeguarded, and vice versa.
  • The critical role of frontline youth workers and mentors like “Nicky” in giving exploited youths a way out.
  • Quote:
    “They will not distinguish between boys, girls. If you're in foster care, in a care home, if you're at grammar school, if they get into your life, they will exploit you.” (David Collins, 29:07)
  • Importance of public awareness that thousands of boys and girls are being groomed for drug running, with devastating consequences:
    “One of them has been carrying a knife because they've been groomed to deal drugs and then they're stabbed by someone from a rival gang…” (David Wood, 33:24)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Fragmentation and Violence:

  “We're finding that these unwritten rules of the streets are no longer applicable and it's a case of free for all.”
  (Dr. Mohammed Ruckman, 05:15)

• On Law Enforcement’s Challenge:

  “Frankly, it seems almost like whack a mole. Just like David Collins saw in York earlier in the series. When you knock one line down, another one starts in its place.”
  (David Wood, 11:12)

• On Legislative Caution:

  “It's punishing victims...this is an issue that is, quote, live and problematic.”
  (David Wood summarizing safeguarding expert views, 23:21)

• On Exploitation's Reach:

  “This is about money and profit and they will not distinguish between boys, girls. If you're in foster care, in a care home, if you're at grammar school, if they get into your life, they will exploit you.”
  (David Collins, 29:07)

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Notable Timestamps

• 01:34 — 02:45: Police dawn raid in Walsall, setting scene for arrest.
• 04:21 — 06:15: Dr. Ruckman discusses the evolution of county lines structure and violence.
• 07:28 — 09:53: Policing Minister Sarah Jones explains government perspective and shift to a national policing service.
• 10:00 — 11:53: Dan Mitchell (National County Lines Coordination Centre) details policing successes and ongoing scale of problem.
• 12:02 — 15:58: Changes in how drug lines operate, with focus on drugs sold and data analysis.
• 16:03 — 16:41: Discrepancy in prosecution rates for various drugs discussed with data journalist George Willoughby.
• 21:08 — 24:25: Details of new legislative proposals and debates about victimization/prosecution of young people.
• 27:03 — 33:24: Reflections from Northern Editor David Collins on the blurred lines between victims and perpetrators, and the critical role of individualized support.

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Conclusion

This episode reveals that while police and policymakers have adapted and scored notable successes, the fragmented, rapidly-evolving nature of county lines crime and its deep social roots mean the threat continually morphs. New laws may help, but critics fear they could criminalize the exploited. Human stories, data trends, and expert analysis coalesce into the uncomfortable truth: county lines remain a game of whack-a-mole, with thousands of young lives at risk, demanding flexible, compassionate, and proactive solutions.

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Transcript

[Narrator/Host]

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[David Wood]

From the Times and the Sunday Times. This is the story. It's a quite a dark, drizzly morning in mid October. We are stood on a residential street, very narrow terraced houses in the middle of Walsall. It's 6 o' clock in the morning and about 30 minutes ago 10 officers silently marched up to a door, surrounded it and used a battering ram. To force entry. Police officer piled inside. The father was quite alarmed. What are you doing? And we noticed the next door neighbor hanging out the window asking what was going on. Various curtains twitching on the surrounding properties. They went upstairs and detained one suspect.

[David Collins]

Grace area.

[George Willoughby]

It's a warrant.

[David Wood]

Hang up the phone. A man who's bleeding in his late 20s, young South Asian man wearing a baby blue tracksuit. As he was led towards an unmarked car, he stuck his middle finger up at us and was put in the back of the car and driven to custody. 23 year old Mohammed Kashid pleaded guilty to supplying class A drugs through the frosty line, a county line drug operation which had for months been selling crack cocaine and heroin over the phone. I'm David Wood, the crime editor at the Times. On the surface, this might feel like a story you've heard before. County line holder caught by police. The line shut down. This series we've told you about these cases again and again, but there's something different about the man in the baby blue tracksuit and the county line he ran. It tells us about the future of county lines, how criminals are adapting to escape arrest and why, for some, it's working. The story today on the line Episode 5 Whack a Mo.

[Dr. Mohammed Ruckman]

When I first came across county lines, I believe it was around about 2013, 2014, and I just started my PhD research.

[David Wood]

Dr. Mohammed Ruckman is a criminologist based in Birmingham. He studies organised crime and serious violence in gangs. Back in the early days of his PhD, years before county lines were taken seriously by the police and politicians, he started to think what was emerging was a marked change in British crime.

[Dr. Mohammed Ruckman]

I kept on thinking about conversations I've had with people that are acutely aware of the drugs landscape from the late 80s to the early 90s, and they were all saying to me, this is just a label. It's been going on. The only difference, however, is the exploitation. But something didn't add up.

[David Wood]

For starters, the violence Mohammed's research revealed wasn't targeted in a familiar pattern.

[Dr. Mohammed Ruckman]

Often criminals that are operating within a group manner have these unwritten rules and codes, not to hurt or harm women, girls, children. But we're finding that these unwritten rules of the streets are no longer applicable and it's a case of free for all.

[David Wood]

He came to believe what was once organized by tight knit families or racial groups had fragmented and mixed with urban street gangs to create something messier, more chaotic.

[Dr. Mohammed Ruckman]

And that in itself is quite interesting because we no longer have necessarily the big fishes. We now have clusters, smaller groups that are disorganized, that don't necessarily have identity in the sense of coming from a particular ethnic background or race. Rather, groups are happy to bump shoulders and work together for largely financial gain.

[David Wood]

That shift to fragmented allegiances didn't just increase the levels of violence, but the number of people drawn into these criminal enterprises. In 2015, the National Crime Agency identified just under 200 criminal groups and 600 young people involved in county lines. Nationwide today, there are at least 6,500 active lines, with more than 14,000 children believed to be at risk of criminal exploitation. In fact, one survey by the Youth endowment fund found one in nine children aged 13 to 17 said they had been approached to either sell or transport drugs or hold weapons, drugs or cash. Children aren't the only ones targeted. I've spoken to a number of youth workers who've told me that gang leaders are recruiting more small boat migrants to work as drug runners. With no money, stuck in asylum hotels, unable to work, these migrants can be easy targets for drug gangs. And all of this has meant county lines is no longer simply a problem for academics like Mohammed Rahman, but at the heart of political debate.

[Sarah Jones]

I'm Sarah Jones, I'm the Policing Minister. We have a target to halve knife crime in a generation. And if you look at the violence that follows county lines, not just at the very serious organised crime level, as it were, but also the kids on the street who are exploited to carry drugs, carrying knives, they are hurting each other. And if we want to tackle knife crime at its root cause, you've got to get under the skin of what's going on with county lines. I think the public feel this when they see young kids who should be, you know, playing with their friends, having a decent childhood, who are being picked up from towns across the country where they have been paid to go to hand over drugs and they are in a incredibly exploited, very difficult, very dangerous situation. I think we all, we all understand that that has to be a model that we need to try and crack.

[David Wood]

Sarah Jones boasts that since Labour came to power, 3,000 county lines have been shut down.

[Sarah Jones]

Has it stopped the problem? No, of course it hasn't. We must always be finding new ways to get one step ahead of what the criminals are doing. And one of the really exciting things about our reform agenda that we're introducing, the White Paper that we've introduced, setting up a national police service, the County Line's leadership and direction will sit at that national level so that we can look across the whole country to drive improvements in every area that we're using. So whether that's new technology or whether that's the models of policing we have in our hyper local communities where people

[David Wood]

are impacted, is there a suggestion, then that the current model of trying to enforce and trying to take out those, say, another 3,000 lines is. Is that why it's being absorbed into that National Policing Service?

[Sarah Jones]

I think it's working really well in the areas where it's in at the moment. How we funded it going forward has been that the Home Office is providing extra funding to policing in order to work across boundaries and work together to tackle this In a national policing Service model, you've got your National County Lines unit in that National Police Service working with forces. You embed this into the system so that everybody is following the evidence and joining up the dots.

[David Wood]

You good? We're good. If you can start by saying your name, your title, and then we'll go from there.

[Dan Mitchell]

So, hi, I'm Dan Mitchell, I'm a Detective Superintendent and head of the National County Lines Coordination Centre.

[David Wood]

If Labour wants to double down on a national strategy for county lines, Dan Mitchell is one person who can tell us if it's working. He's led the centre since 2023.

[Dan Mitchell]

Council lines generally originate from London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. Very recently we've introduced a new task force in West Yorkshire, so we've got top five areas of drug lines coming out.

[David Wood]

His team has spent years getting different police forces to work together to reduce harm. Like Sarah Janes, he can rattle off a list of successes.

[Dan Mitchell]

Since 2019, policing has shut 8,871 county lines, made over 27,000 arrests and referred 13,500 people for safeguarding.

[David Wood]

But despite all that, Dan is the first to admit the underlying problem hasn't gone away.

[Dan Mitchell]

Over the last two to three years, we're seeing more county lines recorded than ever. So at the moment estimate, there's at least in the region of 7,000 county lines in operation nationally, which is a lot.

[David Wood]

Frankly, it seems almost like whack a mole. Just like David Collins saw in York earlier in the series. When you knock one line down, another one starts in its place. But inside the National Command Centre, Dan sees things shift and change. As police across the country crack down, entrepreneurial criminals are changing their business model to avoid detection.

[Dan Mitchell]

In reality, the numbers of lines that come out of the key exporter force areas, last year they were less. They were 12% less than the year before. And if you look at all of the numbers of crack cocaine lines nationally, that's pretty much the same. Which is broadly in line with drugs misuse treatment services that have said, got about the same numbers of people seeking treatment.

[David Wood]

The Crime Survey of England and Wales also suggests there's been no real change in the number of people using Class A drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin.

[Dan Mitchell]

So we think the demand's pretty much the same.

[David Wood]

What's changed is how the lines operate. Firstly, they've become more localised. Not crossing the country from Birmingham to York to deal, but staying in one place. Take the Frosty line run by the man in the baby blue tracksuit who I saw arrested in Walsall, Grace.

[David Collins]

There we are.

[George Willoughby]

It's a warrant.

[David Wood]

Hang up the phone. That mostly supplied drugs. Just seven miles away in West Bromwich,

[Dan Mitchell]

when we started 80, 90% of drugs lines were coming out of one force area and going to another. So we're traveling some distance now. It's less than half. That is a little bit of the whack a mole that you're talking about, where corner gangs are saying, what's policing's focus? Well, it's on the cross border drugs lines. You know, you've been to court, you've seen the types of evidence we present and we'll present maps and say, this telephone started in this big city, it ended in this smaller, more rural location. Here's all of the points of movement and this shows that's a county line. When you've made 27,000 arrests and you've shut nearly 9,000 lines and you've presented evidence in all of those cases, it's going to be the case that criminal gangs are thinking, well, what do we do differently?

[David Wood]

More localised drug lines has meant police have seen a reduction in the number of children trafficked across the country. But they've also seen a shift in which drugs are sold.

[Dan Mitchell]

So on those drug lines crossing force boundaries, the drugs that are supplied on those lines, 90% of the lines sell

[David Wood]

crack and heroin lines which start and end in the same town.

[Dan Mitchell]

On the other hand, those lines sell a much greater diversity of drugs. So local lines only around about 65% sell crack and heroin. And we'll see three times as many lines selling cocaine or cannabis.

[David Wood]

Ketamine and MDMA are also popular. These are what are kindly referred to as recreational drugs, not quite as addictive as Kraken heroin. Their users are more affluent, middle class and dealers respond to this by changing the way they sell. Instead of texting out offers, they use social media or encrypted apps.

[Dan Mitchell]

We very rarely will see crack, cockane and heroin sold on social media. It's almost entirely cannabis. So you might have 80% of lines on social media selling cannabis. The other lines will sell party drugs, ketamine, powder cocaine, pink cocaine, mdma. And if you think about the mechanism of supply, I think a lot of that is to do with the end user. So if you're a middle class recreational powder cocaine user, you're more likely to have a smartphone, you're more likely to get himself in a social media network and seek your drugs for that mechanism. Just a totally different market with a

[David Wood]

totally different arrest rate. In the Times London office, my colleague George Willoughby has been helping me dig into the data. George, what's in front of us?

[George Willoughby]

So we've got a big spreadsheet in front of us and this is going through 7 million lines of crime data. It's a combination of figures from the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. Each year has its own file, so it's a lot harder than it should have been. But with a little bit of code, we can stitch that all together and we can see the court outcomes for every specific crime going back 10 years.

[David Wood]

And I can see that it's been arranged by year, by police force, by offence codes and also outcomes. So you've got charge rates, sentencing rates and convictions as well?

[George Willoughby]

That's correct, yes. You've got all those demographics in there. We get real good picture of what's going on. And from that we can see that the police are focusing on targeting offenders dealing with the classic county line products such as heroin and crack cocaine. The number of offenders jailed for supplying heroin, for example, has increased around 80% in the past decade. So in 2016, about 800 people jailed and last year this is shot up to around 1,400.

[David Wood]

What about those who've been caught with intent to supply, for example, cannabis and mdma?

[George Willoughby]

So it's actually quite a contrast here. So the number of dealers who have been sentenced for possession with intensive supply for cannabis and mdma, that's actually fallen over the same time period, and this is despite it becoming more prevalent in the county lines model.

[David Wood]

So what you're suggesting is convictions for heroin are rising, but those for cannabis are going down?

[George Willoughby]

That's correct, yes.

[David Wood]

So how much has it gone down by?

[George Willoughby]

So the Home Office data shows us that the number of cannabis dealers sentenced for possession with intent to supply of Class B drug fell around 37% between 2016 and 2025. And for MDMA, there was a fall of around 43% over the same time period.

[David Wood]

So what does this data tell us in the whole.

[George Willoughby]

Well, the research suggests that there are around 500 social media lines. This is around 8% of the total active lines in the country. And what this does, it raises the prospect that the lack of police focus on this growing area is letting dealers move under the radar and they're getting away with it.

[David Wood]

Frankly, there's more focus need to be put on those types of social media lines to tackle that type of drug dealing.

[Sarah Jones]

It's fair to say that you can buy anything on social media and we need to crack down on that completely.

[David Wood]

Sarah Jones, the Policing Minister, again, I

[Sarah Jones]

had a Recent set of meetings about people buying vapes online, children being able to access vapes that have illegal drugs in them in social media spaces, and what we can do about that. The landscape of drug taking changes over time. Now, I would say we are absolutely right through the County Lions programme to focus on that very high, very violent type of drug sale through the County Lyons model, where you've got people who are mostly dealing heroin and crack cocaine that obviously have enormous high harm to those individuals who are addicted to them. But the violence that is associated with those drugs is particularly acute. And we know through the County Line programme we have managed to reduce that knife crime that we see on our streets directly because of the interventions that have been made through the County Lines program. But do we have to look at other forms of drugs and the way they're being sold? 100% we do.

[David Wood]

In 2020, a government report found that heroin and crack cocaine markets are most closely linked to violence. But if the National County Lines Coordination Centre is seeing other drug markets like cannabis, those historically associated with lower levels of violence taken over by traditional County Lines model that has exploitation built in, then that pattern may not hold. And in the meantime, these lines seem to be acting with impunity. A safe place for criminals to remain out of sight. In this ever evolving game of whack a molecule, Labour believes new laws will give police and prosecutors an upper hand. We'll tell you about those in just a moment.

[Narrator/Host]

Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? The fact is, a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never really wanted in the first place. But we stick it out and we give reasons. Like what if the next move is worse? And I've put years into this place and maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, either at your existing job or by helping you find a new one. Your coach helps clarify your goals, creates a plan and keeps you accountable along the way. Go to Strawberry Me Career and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me Career.

[David Wood]

Hey, marketers, here's something to note. 75% of listeners don't consider podcasters to be influencers. Yet 84% say a podcaster has changed their mind about something they once believed. That's the paradox of podcast influence. It's built on credibility, not clout. Trust, not trends. Acast's podcast Pulse 2025 report reveals how podcast creators are redefining influence through resonance multi platform fandoms and their ability to shape culture. Get the full report [e-mail]. We've been talking about how county lines operations have been shifting to avoid detection by police, staying local and diversifying the drugs they sell. As law enforcement tries to keep up. The government believe it has an ace up its sleeve. As part of the Crime and Policing Bill currently making its way through the House of Lords, three new offences are about to be created.

[Sarah Jones]

Yes. So we're introducing a law on child criminal exploitation. I think we all know very well what child sexual exploitation is and there is a good response in the state in terms of how we recognise and understand that and deal with it. For child criminal exploitation, not quite so much. And we need to recognise and help the police to deal with the people who are pushing that kind of crime. So these vulnerable kids who are being groomed into county lines, it should be an offence to exploit children in that specific way.

[David Wood]

Cuckooing where someone's property is taken over as a base for drug dealing will also become a new offence. Remember, we heard officers in York checking up on vulnerable residents, trying to disrupt gangs who could talk or intimidate their way in.

[Sarah Jones]

And then thirdly, the problem of it's horrible to talk about. It's called plugging, where you basically force somebody to hold drugs for you in, in your body and put it into your body, which is hugely dangerous for those people.

[David Wood]

Think of Mike, who you heard from yesterday, being asked to bank it while carrying class as on trains. It's the same thing.

[Sarah Jones]

So we're trying to make sure the legislation keeps up to date with the crimes that are occurring and that we name them in the right way so that the police can act in the right way to protect people.

[David Wood]

Cuckooing will carry a maximum five year prison term, while the criminal exploitation of children and coerced internal concealment, known as plugging or banking, it will carry up to 10 years. Dan Mitchell, who runs the National County Lines Coordination Centre, thinks the law could be game changing.

[Dan Mitchell]

It's going to be very clear that child criminal exploitation is an offence. You can't get a child to engage in criminal activity. That's going to be against the law and it's going to be much more simple I think than the current modern slavery legislation, which we do use and we have had success in. But ultimately, if you look at how that law was designed, it was designed for international trafficking. This is more about a power imbalance that occurs and more about how someone that's got an ability to coerce and put pressure on a younger person is able to take advantage of them.

[David Wood]

Back in episode three, police in York told my colleague David Collins how modern slavery legislation could be a roadblock to their attempts to tackle County Lines, saying they were seeing a rise in children, moving up the ranks of drug gangs, holding the line themselves and then saying they were exploited. But I've also spoken to safeguarding experts who are concerned that the new legislation could mean more child victims are prosecuted. Police often aim to target those further up the chain, the people organising the business, recruiting drug runners. But some of these new laws target actions such as cuckooing, which are more likely done by a child rather than the adults controlling them. And there's no minimum age for prosecution. If, for example, a 16 year old runner asked a 14 year old to swallow a condom containing Class a drugs, the 16 year old could face court. Now, they said this is an issue that is, quote, live and problematic and it's punishing victims. How do you respond to that?

[Sarah Jones]

Well, I think with all of these things it's complicated and there are vulnerabilities amongst young people that we have to appreciate, but there are also crimes that we need to make sure there are consequences for and you've got to get the right mix. And what works in the County Lines program and what we fund as part of the money for County Lines is those kinds of support services for young people to help and to intervene and to try to draw them away from the world that they're living in. These are often very vulnerable young people who are at the same time doing pretty horrific things. So there is a balance here, but there also has to be consequences. And we have this debate in Parliament quite often. What's the age of criminal responsibility? What's the right intervention when a child is found with a knife, what do you do if a child, and in your example, if a 16 year old is forcing a 14 year old to conceal drugs? That's a pretty serious thing that person is doing and there has to be consequences. So we have to make sure we're trying, with the right intervention. And what we're trying to do in the Home Office through another program, is to identify who those children are who are on the edge of getting involved in criminal activity, who Maybe have been arrested but not charged, but they're not part of the criminal justice system, so nobody is is saying, hang on a minute, this child has been arrested three times, they haven't been charged, but they're clearly involved in criminal activity that they shouldn't be. What's the right intervention and getting people round a table, different services to say, right, this person needs mentoring, this person needs support, this person's got a crisis going on at home. So we have to be doing that part of the puzzle as well.

[David Wood]

But some of those who studied County Lines since the start are unconvinced that these latest laws are the answer.

[Dr. Mohammed Ruckman]

Dr. Mohammed Ruckman often I find it's the case that the government put forward new interventions or policies, but by then criminals adapt and they change their behaviour in such a manner whereby those crimes may no longer apply to them. So while it's important to recognize that the government are putting forward impactful legislation, the approach needs to be proactive. They need to be able to do this more so in real time so as to be able to mitigate this issue further.

[David Wood]

We've been talking about County Lines all week. We started with David Collins in York, so I wanted to end by asking him what working on this series has taught him.

[David Collins]

There's so much been written, hasn't there, and heard about County Lines. And it's one of those subjects that, I guess for years I thought I knew exactly what it was, I thought I knew the model. So there was part of me where it's like, what are we going to find out? That's new. North Yorkshire Police very kindly allowed me to embed with them, to see what they were doing, really on the front line of this from an enforcement point of view. And I guess I was surprised at how much I found out about their frustrations, really. You know, I know me and you, we've discussed, haven't we, the National Referral Mechanism, and obviously it safeguards a lot of young people who are vulnerable. What I found interesting was where do you draw the line between being a victim and being a perpetrator? When you start to speak to the police and the prosecutors, you can see how tricky that line is to decide on. Do you criminalize a young person, say they're 14, 15 years old, and go down the criminal justice route with them? Or do you safeguard them and put them into National Referral Mechanism? And it was just interesting where I felt like the police were telling me, people have slipped the net both ways. You know, maybe people have been safeguarded that shouldn't have been. Maybe people have been prosecuted that shouldn't have been.

[David Wood]

Do you think the public now can have a better understanding of what they thought County Lines was? Because much of this project for me, 10 years on from when it first came into the public's consciousness through the National Crime Agency intelligence report, but actually he's trying to explain to people that this is widespread drug dealing which is facilitated by exploitation of children and vulnerable people. Do you think that we have been able to help demystify that and kind of break it down for the listeners?

[David Collins]

I think so. I hope so. I mean, I guess I've been a lot with the police and the investigators and, you know, your work, for example, speaking to one of the kind of the victims, which was a really important interview to get, I think, because I do think it is really important, important from a public interest perspective on how were children groomed? How are they exploited? How did these gangs get into your life? How did he make first contact? These are children from all backgrounds, aren't they? Certain demographics will be easier to target than others, but I actually think gangs will use anybody that they can use. This is about money and profit and they will not distinguish between boys, girls. If you're in foster care, in a care home, if you're a. At grammar school, if they get into your life, they will exploit you.

[David Wood]

It's about control at the end of the day, isn't it? And I really got that when we went and spoke to Mike, a young man who really bravely and very candidly talked about his experiences both in London and the Midlands. I was really, really impressed with the way he was able to just come into a situation which is quite, you know, unfamiliar to him. Meeting a videographer and podcast producer, a journalist, a photographer.

[David Collins]

Yeah, quite courageous of him, isn't it,

[David Wood]

to tell his story at such a young age. Such a reminder about the work that youth workers do and the importance of having well funded programs that are able to provide that intervention and that support. You know, Michael explained how when he was arrested and taken into custody, the referral went through to the program and came via St. Giles Trust. And that's how he met his mentor, Nicky. And Nicky was with us in the room when we did the interview. And, you know, what a remarkable woman. Such a sunny disposition. And he talked about how he used the word lectures. She used to give me lectures. And they got a rapport where he was able to talk to someone in a position who could help him. Not a parent, not someone who was in the police, someone who he felt he could really unburden himself to, you know, he's luck. I don't like to use the word lucky, but he's fortunate because he has her support and the support of the program. But it was a reminder that not everybody is as fortunate. And you wonder for every one Michael there is, you wonder how many fall through the cracks or who don't get that vital support.

[David Collins]

Thousands of children are being affected by this across the uk. These children are being groomed, aren't they? It's like you were saying earlier, they're being groomed and exploited, but it's not specific to London, to Birmingham, to York, to Liverpool. This is going on wherever money can be made from drug users, isn't it? Because it's a business.

[David Wood]

What you just said reminded me of something Professor Simon Harding said to me in June, June, July last year. We were talking about something unrelated. It was around the time that the grooming inquiry was announced. And he said, it's great that we're focusing quite rightly on the sexual exploitation and grooming of young girls, but we really need to face up to the fact that thousands of boys are being groomed and exploited to run drugs around the country and their lives are at risk. And that's when I thought, yeah, it's something that I can join the dots. Having spent so much time covering various youth homicides and gang related violence. You can trace it back when you hear the prosecutor outline the case at the Crown Court and then when it gets to trial and you look at the opening and when the kid, there's always often a kid, you know, their date of birth might be, I don't know, for example, 15th of February 2010, 2011 and they've been arraigned on murder charges.

[David Collins]

Extraordinary.

[David Wood]

One of them has been carrying a knife because they've been groomed to deal drugs and then they're stabbed by someone from a rival gang and there kids bleeding to death on, on the streets and behind that is the exploitation.

[David Collins]

Always good to see you, David.

[David Wood]

You too. In this episode you heard from Sarah Jones, the policing minister, Dr. Mohammed Ruckman, detective Superintendent Dan Mitchell, David Collins, the Northern editor of the Sunday Times and George Willoughby, a senior data journalist at the Times and Sunday Times. The producers today were Kate Lamball and Edward Drummond. The executive producer was Dan Box. Sound design and theme composition were by Mao Laceto. If you would like to get in touch about this story, you can send us an email to thestoryetimes.com I'm David Wood. Thank you for listening and I'LL see you soon.

[Dan Mitchell]

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