It was approaching midnight on a near-freezing December evening in 2004 in east London’s New Spitalfields Market, the daily destination for hundreds of tons of exotic fruit and vegetables from around the globe. Andrew Pritchard pulled his Audi up to a large white delivery van, turned off the engine and waited for the van’s back doors to open.
The son of a Jamaican mother and white cockney father, Pritchard was brought up in 1970s Stoke Newington, at the time a tough east London neighbourhood. A self-made millionaire by the age of twenty-two, he had forged his reputation as a party promoter in the 1990s, setting up illegal acid-house raves in derelict sites across London. But after a disastrous involvement in concert promotion, Pritchard turned his entrepreneurial flair to drug smuggling.
Driving to the rendezvous, Pritchard had a feeling that something was not quite right, but dismissed it as paranoia. He should have trusted his senses, because he and his tight-knit gang were about to walk into a carefully laid trap. The smugglers they were meeting had been under police surveillance for some months, initially targeted after an undercover unit linked one member to a Greek cocaine dealer who had just been handed a six-year sentence. By listening in to their conversations, Customs and Excise investigators had learned of a suspect shipment of 300 sacks of coconuts, travelling from Guyana in South America via the Caribbean to Pritchard.
The shipment was intercepted inside a refrigerated container along its route and searched. Customs investigators started smashing coconuts, but all they contained was milk. So they took apart the refrigeration system itself. Hidden inside was their prize: a massive 500 kg of high-purity cocaine packed into blocks and sewn into sacks.
The investigators weighed and fingerprinted the cocaine packages, replaced them with similar-sized blocks of wood, sewed the sacks back up and set the container on its way, seemingly untouched, to New Spitalfields Market. Now all they needed to do was lay in wait for the buyers to show themselves.
Pritchard was checking his watch, waiting for the others to arrive, when the sound of screeching brakes and blinding headlights froze his blood. The next instant a masked man was staving in his front windscreen with a baton, covering Pritchard with shards of broken glass. His first thought as he opened his eyes was that he was about to be shot by a rival gang. Instead he was pulled out of his car, forced to the ground and arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.
By the next morning the drug-bust had hit the national media. With a street-value of £50 million, it was up until that point the largest ever seizure of cocaine on mainland Britain. Customs investigators revealed to a waiting press that the dramatic arrest of Pritchard and six others was the climax of a lengthy, multimillion pound investigation.
‘This was an extremely successful operation,172 and an excellent example of the way Customs is working to prevent the smuggling of Class A drugs,’ said Duncan Stewart, assistant chief investigation officer for Customs and Excise. Operation Cyprus was proudly declared a rare victory in the ongoing battle to make a dent in the relentless tide of drugs entering Britain.
But seventeen months later, the showcase cocaine haul had come to nothing. Not one of the gang, many of whom had faced a maximum thirty-five-year sentence, was convicted of cocaine trafficking. The buyers’ line of defence was that they were indeed importers of contraband goods, but that they had no idea that drugs were involved. They maintained instead that they were expecting to unwrap a shipment of ‘moody’ cigars hidden among the coconuts. Someone unknown, they said, had swapped the cigars for cocaine. The defendants even pointed the finger at Customs, who they accused of institutional corruption.
Prosecutors failed to convince any members of the jury that the gang was, without doubt, directly linked to the cocaine, and Pritchard and his fellow smugglers walked free. Charged with the impossible task of stemming the flow of illegal drugs across Britain’s 12,000 miles of coastline, the ‘cocaine and coconuts’ case was a disaster for Customs investigators who saw the bust of a lifetime turn to dust.
While Customs staff were still picking themselves up off the floor, Pritchard’s entrepreneurial mind was working overtime. He didn’t want to see the inside of a remand cell again.
Chatting in a bar173 in east London’s Hoxton Square, the venue of one of his biggest raves in the 1990s, Pritchard rattles through a colourful backlog of tales. The stories form the narrative of his book Urban Smuggler,174 which was published in 2008 and billed as ‘the rollicking life story of one of the most prolific smugglers of our time’.
High-profile cases such as Pritchard’s are an embarrassment for the police, exposing their failures in the nationwide ‘war on drugs’. The statistics reveal the truth: less than 1 per cent175 of drug shipments are stopped at British borders, and only 10 per cent of organised gangs supplying drugs to the streets of Britain are under investigation at any one time.
Because of its close association with organised crime, the trafficking and distribution of drugs is viewed as one of the most serious threats that Britain’s law-enforcement agencies must deal with, second only to terrorism. It is a mandate that places the police firmly at the front line in the defence of social order and the battle against what is seen by many as the ‘chaotic forces’ of drug use and drug selling.
Police and drug criminals have been playing out what both sides often refer to as ‘the game’ in earnest since the spread of illegal drug use in the 1960s. From the bobby on the beat to the drug squad officer, Customs officials to serious organised crime detectives, Britain’s law enforcers are charged with stemming the supply of drugs from the borders down to the streets. They have formidable powers to tackle the trade: stop-and-search tactics, undercover drug purchases and the use of sniffer dogs to hi-tech drug detectors outside bars, raids on people’s homes and businesses and the power to close down venues where drugs are sold.
In order to target higher-level organisations, these powers can, if sanctioned by the courts, extend to surveillance such as bugging, the use of informants, deep undercover agents, the ability to seek out and seize assets and the control by the Home Office of some drug-selling outfits in order to catch others.
But cases such as Pritchard’s only serve to highlight that not only are the dice loaded in favour of the criminal fraternity, but the game leaves the police facing an ever-expanding workload.
The police in Britain deal with an average of 5,000 drug cases a week176. Over half of all prisoners177 in Britain reported committing offences connected to their drug taking. It is estimated that between a third and a half of all acquisitive crime,178 such as shoplifting, is related to illegal drug use.
Research suggests that most addicted heroin or crack users need to earn between £15,000–30,000 a year to sustain their habit,179 and while some do so from dealing drugs themselves, many accumulate cash by selling on goods they have stolen. Because stolen goods fetch180 around a third of their normal value, it is thought that around £2.5 billion worth of goods are taken each year to pay for drugs.
At every stage of that journey, the trafficking, selling and use of drugs is connected to a host of ancillary crimes, from illegal immigration, the payment and exploitation of drug couriers, money laundering, gun-running, violence and corruption to prostitution, pimping, shoplifting, theft, burglary and mugging.
Add to this the antisocial impact that the street drug trade can have on communities, such as drug dealing or injecting in public areas, and the daunting task of policing the trade becomes apparent.
It is a war that was launched a century ago at an international drug conference in The Hague in 1912, where, with war looming on the horizon, it was agreed that opium, morphine and cocaine must be restricted to medical use.
In Dope Girls,181 a book about Britain’s early twentieth-century drug scene, writer Marek Kohn describes ‘London’s first drug-bust’ in 1916. Two officers, police sergeants Hedges and Venner, arrested Willy Johnson after seeing him hawking bags of cocaine. But Johnson was acquitted because the officers had not witnessed an actual drug deal. This and similar cases led to the possession of cocaine or opium becoming a criminal offence in 1916, introduced as an amendment to the Defence of the Realm Act.
In the late 1950s, British police began to detect the re-emergence of a drug scene, in the clubland of London’s West End. By the 1960s, the street trade in cannabis, cocaine and heroin had begun to proliferate, as had the moral panic surrounding the rise of recreational drug use and bohemian counter-culture. In a decade that witnessed the relaxation of controls on gambling, homosexuality, censorship and abortion, the laws against drugs were tightened.
And they were draconian. Up until the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, there was little distinction between types of drug and drug-related offences. Those caught possessing or taking small quantities of cannabis and opium received similar sentences to those convicted for manufacturing or dealing. The Act, the basis of which remains the central plank of today’s drug laws despite being more than forty years old, divided drugs into three ‘classes’ based on a falling scale of harm, from A to C.
But what was easy to legislate against has not proved as easy to police. In the space of four decades drug crime has moved from being a neighbourhood concern to winning the status of serious organised crime. It is an arms race in which law enforcers have never had the upper hand.
In the mid-1980s, when criminologist Dick Hobbs182 began his studies, a maverick era of policing was coming to an end. ‘In the days183 of early drug policing it was all about neighbourhood policing, where local cops would have extensive knowledge of what was going on in their patch. They would deal with it or accept bribes to turn a blind eye.’
Despite the huge success in 1977 of Operation Julie, a well-co-ordinated undercover operation that smashed a prolific LSD factory in rural Wales, by the end of the 1970s drug squads had gained a reputation for corruption. On one hand, as an ex-hippy from Torbay interviewed for a south Devon community website explained, ‘The drug squad were known as the police gardening club184 because of their fondness for planting stuff on people.’ On the other, the decade saw a series of corruption cases brought against Met Police drug detectives accused of bribery, theft and blackmail.
The impact of the corruption cases was far greater than just being an embarrassment – they signalled the end of the hands-on community policing of known drug criminals, halting the natural flow of information that might be exchanged over a drink or by listening to the chatter on the street. Hobbs says that from then on, policing and drug crime decoupled, leaving a black hole in police intelligence.
Throughout the 1970s, individual forces began to establish specialist drug squads. Most of their work was taken up busting low-level suppliers of cannabis, speed and LSD, creating further strains between themselves and local communities, who accused the police of routinely targeting local black youths on the premise that they were likely drug users. These heavy-handed tactics were to become one of the key causes of the Brixton Riots in 1981, and were cited by rioters as being one of the main causes of the rioting and looting in London, Birmingham and Manchester in the summer of 2011.
But regardless of the abilities of police to maintain links with communities, according to Hobbs, their position has been further compromised as a series of governments have sought to fight the drug war first on a domestic and then on an international platform, turning the focus of policing from Britain’s streets to foreign climes and back again, like a searchlight on a watchtower that fails to find its target.
With each new government has come a change in emphasis in policy as it responds to the failures of the last administration. But in doing so the top-down reorganisations have never allowed law enforcers to settle, with changes causing investigations on the ground to lose momentum or be cancelled as resources and staff are redeployed. ‘The gangs can react overnight. But governments and police react on a three-to-five-year cycle of policy, says former Scottish Police Chief Graeme Pearson185 who believes the constant reorganisation of the police forces since the 1970s has created ‘blindspots’ for the criminal fraternity in which to work.
‘Structural changes create a diversion for staff as they take on new roles, planning structures and new ways of working – and cartels take advantage of this upheaval. SOCA will now merge into the national crime agency, and that doesn’t start until 2013, and by that time the drug trade will have shifted considerably.’
The policy changes started in earnest under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s as cheap, smokable heroin from the Middle East and South East Asia poured into the country. The Tory government acted quickly and drug enforcement was handed substantial amounts of money with which to tackle the new threat. But it was not only front-line police who had a fresh injection of cash. A new era of uber law enforcer was born that would police by intelligence, and drug crime would effectively shape policing.
At first police tried to mimic what they saw as the pyramid-style structure of the drug trade: numerous base-level street sellers, the middle market and a handful of top-end traffickers. At the top sat the National Drugs Intelligence Unit (NDIU), which filtered information down to specialist drug wings of regional crime squads and local drug squads. The NDIU was rebranded as the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) in 1992, and alongside the National Crime Squad continued to see the drug trade, making up three-quarters of its caseload, as its major quarry.
One of the problems senior organised-crime officers faced was that their foe was highly adaptable, elusive, and very difficult to pin down. Often, by the time investigators were able to gain a composite picture of an organisation, it had mutated. Organised crime was so much easier to tackle if it was, indeed, organised. But police have always been keen to play up the ‘highly organised’ nature of drug gangs. The more corporate or militaristic organised-crime groups are made to be, according to one senior drug detective, the more money police will be given to fight them.
Three decades ago, John Grieve, head of the Met Police drug squad in the late 1980s and early 1990s, called drug networks ‘a threadbare patchwork quilt of alliances and hatreds’. He said that what the police described in the media as a ‘drug business’ could be, as earlier described, a group of people connected, from a café in Liverpool to a Colombian cocaine producer, by ‘four handshakes’186.
Yet however streetwise the drug detectives thought they were, or however much the structure at the top was reshuffled, it became increasingly apparent that, with rising levels of drugs use and an increasing number of criminal firms becoming involved in the drug trade, the police’s attempts to stem the tide were not enough. And policing powers and responsibilities extended to combat its financial muscle that allowed it to evade detection.
Tony Blair’s Labour government came to power in 1997 with a new determination to break the financial backbone of the organisations behind the street drug sellers. ‘What we’187re trying to do is say the issue of drugs and international organised crime is so serious that we have to treat it for what it is, an international business, a cruel business,’ Blair told the G8 summit in Japan in 2000.
The upshot was the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which consolidated and strengthened the police’s ability to investigate and seize the proceeds of crime. It was a legislative sledgehammer that turned a key principle of British law – of being presumed innocent before proven guilty – on its head. And not just for drug dealers. Anyone with a bank account, mortgage or hidden vaults of cash is now accountable in law to be able to produce a paper trail proving that their financial dealings are legitimate. Any payment of £10,000 or over made in cash is now flagged up as potentially suspicious. For the first time it made British banks, the city, mortgage advisers, car salesmen and shop owners potentially unwitting accomplices where money once passed hands in daily business.
Where once money laundering was considered a crime after the fact, evidence of collusion in trafficking triggers an investigation delving back up to six years into financial accounts. But while the legislation overturned legal principles, it became a PR tool for the government as an ever-growing body of evidence was coming to light that they were losing the war on drugs.
Jumping forward to 2003, an internal ‘blue sky’188 drug-policy document written by Blair’s private adviser, former director general of the BBC John Birt, revealed that traditional law enforcement was soaking up large amounts of public cash while doing little to stem the flow of drugs. However, the briefing argued that the present policy should not only be continued, but that it must be ‘proclaimed’ in the national press as often as possible.
Drug crime took on a fresh international perspective in 2006 as the law-enforcement spotlight was cast on drug criminals, in Spain, West Africa and the Caribbean. It took the fight, and focus, to producing nations. With a £20 million annual budget and 4,000 staff including specialists from MI5 and MI6, SOCA promised to ‘make life hell for gangsters and drug barons’.
The agency, dubbed by the media ‘Britain’s version of the FBI’, incorporated the old National Crime Squad and NCIS. Its top priorities were tackling human trafficking and the illegal drugs trade. ‘We are not dealing with shambling amateurs. It is a global business, its captains are practical and we have to be equally tough, intelligent, broad-ranging and rigorous in return,’ said the prime minister.
But the agency was criticised for failing to fulfil its brief of bringing down Britain’s Mr Bigs. The Home Affairs Select Committee described its performance as ‘disappointing’ in 2009 after it emerged that it was seizing £1 from gangs189 for every £15 in its budget. And in 2011, when David Cameron laid out his plans to relaunch SOCA as the National Crime Agency in 2014, under the banner Global to Local, and on the back of a consultation exercise called ‘Policing in the Twenty-First Century: Reconnecting Police and the People’, there were raised eyebrows as observers looked on yet another rebranding of Britain’s elite anti-organised crime agency with cynicism. Home Secretary Theresa May declared the new agency would be vital in thwarting the criminal gangs bringing drugs on to the streets, ‘affecting neighbourhoods across the country’.
But while law-enforcement agencies are tasked with bringing down the chimera-like Mr Bigs, it is at street level where most drug policing is concentrated. In 2010, only 2 per cent190 of the 212,784 drug seizures were made by the UK Border Agency. Apart from the clampdown on illegal raves in the early 1990s and calls for middle-class cocaine users to be mindful of the law in the 2000s, the focus of day-to-day policing, prioritised by successive Home Office drug strategies, is fixed firmly upon the cyclical buying and selling on the streets of crack cocaine and heroin.
*
An hour out of east London sits the Suffolk market town of Ipswich. With an eye on the capital’s crowded housing market, property developers have built a slew of upmarket new homes near the town’s revamped docks. The idea was to encourage economic migration and tempt London’s office workers into the relatively cheaper, and more rural, Suffolk commuter belt. But the developers were not the only ones to spot a business opportunity. For nearly a decade now, police in Ipswich, like their counterparts in many commuter towns around Britain, have been struggling to cope with the growing influence on their patch of city-based organisations making trips from the capital to sell crack and heroin.
When the dealers first came on to the radar in Ipswich in 2003, those picked up by police were young black men from gangs in Brent, Hackney and Newham, dressed in the London ‘gangsta’ uniform of chunky chains, designer jeans and expensive trainers. With cheaper drugs, a reliable supply and a feel for violence, the Londoners had decided to flex their muscle away from the crowded scene in their own backyard by grabbing the business from local dealers, and ‘serving up’ to the town’s estimated 1,000 crack and heroin addicts.
Suffolk Police hit back with Operation Wolf, one of the largest anti-drugs actions ever undertaken in the county. Surveillance teams and three undercover officers bought drugs using traceable banknotes and gathered information on the inner workings of the town’s number one crack-and-heroin-selling outfit at the time, the London-based T Business. At dawn one morning, police swooped on the key players in the gang at a series of addresses, seizing mobile phones and the all-important stash – a car boot full of crack and heroin fresh from the capital.
While the T Business were in custody awaiting trial, the Londonisation of Ipswich’s drug market continued. In December 2006 it made national headlines when twenty-four-year-old south Londoner Jimoh Plunkett was killed after being caught in the crossfire in a shoot-out between rival London gangs at the town’s Zest nightclub. But by the time the Operation Wolf arrests came to trial in 2007, the local newspaper gallantly declared success in the battle to rid the town of the gun- and drug-toting invaders.
POLICE DESTROY IPSWICH’S191 DRUG NETWORK
TODAY, for the first time, the full story of how Ipswich police decimated a London gang who controlled the town’s drug-dealing market can be told.
A massive covert operation ended in raids on five properties, seizures of crack, heroin, and cash, thirty-seven arrests and more than two dozen convictions.
After two long years, a series of court cases and more than twenty defendants, the final trial for the police’s Operation Wolf ended with the conviction of Ipswich drug dealer Johnny Callie. Callie was one of ten main players in the T Business, which was controlled by a gang of London drug dealers who infiltrated and flooded the town’s drug market.
But the headline was not nearly so final as it sounded. While it took two years, considerable amounts of public money and untold hours of police and prosecutors’ time to nail the organisation, it took just three weeks for Ipswich’s drug market to return to business as usual.
T Business associates from London, as well as new dealers sniffing an opportunity, swiftly arrived to fill the gap. A SIM card belonging to the gang and containing the phone numbers of most of the town’s crack and heroin addicts was simply reactivated after being sold to new blood, who promptly sent out a text to all contacts with a new number to call. It was a seamless transition more akin to a company takeover than a drug-market free-for-all. Detectives estimate192 they identified around twenty-four new drug-selling outfits in the two-year period between the arrest and the conviction of the T Business.
In Ipswich, like everywhere in Britain, drug dealers set up shop and are dismantled by the police in conveyor-belt fashion – a cycle that goes on largely unnoticed by the public. As supermarket shoppers do with checkout workers, crack and heroin buyers view the changing faces of their sellers with little attention. As soon as one outfit is shut down, another appears, often with a different modus operandi. It is a cat-and-mouse game that is played out on Britain’s streets every day.
For every police success, those managing the dealers merely tweak their tactics, effectively taking their pursuers back to stage one. When runners are picked up on the streets, they start selling from local drug users’ flats. When police target black suspects, they send out white dealers, and when that ploy is rumbled, they switch to Asian dealers. When they realise that mobile-phone texts are being used as evidence to convict their foot soldiers, they make sure that their phones are BlackBerrys and that they are using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service (Unlike text messaging or Twitter, BBM is a private social network where almost all messages are encrypted when they leave the sender’s phone – meaning that many messages are untraceable by the authorities) and that only short phone calls using coded conversations are made.
To reduce risk and baffle the police, runners are sent out in teams: one with a phone, another with the drugs and a third with the money. When convictions on the basis of DNA evidence begin to rocket, dealers order their sellers to wear gloves. Gang members have even been known to attend court hearings for a free briefing on the latest police tactics.
‘I’ve got two wigs in my wardrobe at home, one black and one brown,’ says PC Gemma Astley,193 in a pub around the corner from her police HQ in a northern coastal town. She is one of only a handful of officers in her police force who specialise in drug enforcement. ‘If I’m carrying out surveillance on drug dealers I need to disguise myself. I’ll pop one on, change my clothes, maybe put on some leggings and scrape back my hair. I can fit in anywhere.’
A former part-time actress, PC Astley joined the police fourteen years ago. She applied for the drug unit because of a long-running fascination with gangster flicks and a desire to understand how the big fish operated. She was also painfully aware of the other side of the drug trade – several friends from the market town where she grew up had died from heroin overdoses.
‘It’s easier for women to do undercover drugs work. I can carry out surveillance on a dealer in a park by reading a book on a bench for hours without arousing suspicion. Young male dealers get nervy if another young guy is hanging around. I can literally bump into the dealers I’m watching and they don’t bat an eyelid. But if one of the guys on the squad spends hours hanging around a park they are going to look out of place.’
Although the squad have little in common with those involved in the street drug scene, PC Astley enjoys the fact she is au fait with a world about which most members of the public know very little. ‘At the moment we have fifteen businesses working side by side. You will usually get at least four who are operating on any one day,’ says PC Astley. ‘Firm A has reappeared after a few months out. Firm B has several runners and a manager in charge of their phone. Firm C are always about and then you’ve got Firm D, a new lot.’ Heroin and crack addicts will get text messages from the businesses in town telling them their product is available and, like any consumer, they will migrate towards the best deal. ‘We look out for users on “the stomp”, the unmistakable, determined way of walking they have when they are on the way to buy drugs.’
While there is pressure from the top brass on the drug squad to generate a steady stream of arrests, there is little pride in collaring a user-dealer with two bags of heroin. The results that matter to drug police, and the most likely route to getting to the stash, usually involve resources, manpower and patience.
PC Harry Copeland, a colleague of PC Astley on the drug team, is in his thirties. Out of uniform he looks more like a member of an indie band than a drug-squad detective. ‘There was one group of young lads who moved between here and their base in a major city, supplying drugs to street dealers and returning to replenish their stash,’ says PC Copeland. ‘They were making about £1,000 a day, and were very switched on. They knew full well we were on the lookout for out-of-towners, so they “embedded” themselves here. They had each found a local girlfriend to help them blend in. One rented a flat above a shop near a church graveyard. They were enjoying themselves – smoking cannabis in the day while dishing out crack and heroin, and taking cocaine when they went out clubbing with the local lasses.
‘We hadn’t had much success catching them with the stash, which was what we needed in court, so we decided to set up a covert surveillance operation.’
Using a house opposite the flat, the squad watched the gang for a few hours each day. Transactions, chiefly supplying street dealers, were recorded with a video camera, the quick-click camera often featured in TV shows being useless in capturing lightning-fast drug swaps. After two weeks of painstaking surveillance, the link between the dealers and the stash was made. ‘Early one morning we saw one of the lads pop out the front door into a side passage, move a wheelie bin to one side and lift up one of the paving stones. We were wondering what he was up to and then he pulled out a package.’ The next day the flat was raided and the gang arrested. The dealer who rented the flat received a five-year sentence.
It is not just the often cunning tactics of the dealers that drug police are up against. Unlike their quarry, they are hampered by limited resources and the criminal justice system within which they operate. One detective who has worked in his force’s drug unit in the north-east of England for over a decade recalls his first bust. He caught six men standing in a room in front of £15,000 worth of heroin. Back at the station, flushed with excitement after what seemed like a fine result for a rookie, he was told that the case would be dropped: there was neither the time nor the money to arrest and prosecute all six men.
Even more surprising – and something that police forces are loath to admit – is that because of financial constraints, drug dealers in many parts of the country are less likely to be arrested by specialist drug officers in the afternoon, on bank holidays and on Sundays.
‘We would be discouraged by our bosses from arresting someone towards the end of the day because of the overtime factor. And dealers are often aware of that,’ says Glen, a drug detective194 from the Home Counties, who did not want to be identified. Officers who carry out a drug-dealing arrest must complete the process back at the station themselves, rather than hand it on to a colleague working a later shift. ‘We spot a user buying a few bags of heroin from a dealer and we grab them both. That would take five officers – two taking out the dealer, two on the user and one doing the surveillance. We would need the user because he holds the vital evidence of the sale. If you arrest two people at 2 p.m. then most of you would be busy till 10 p.m. It’s a lot of overtime.’
Another drug detective,195 based in Merseyside, described a similar situation. ‘When we make an arrest, a suspect is grabbed, taken to the station and strip-searched. Evidence – phones, lists of sales, drugs – all needs to be bagged up and put in the property book. The inspector may authorise a search of properties in order to link anything at home to the transaction. This could involve dog handlers and officers looking for something the size of a peanut. Six officers looking for drugs in a house can take four hours. This all has to be listed and documented. Back at the station the suspects are interviewed, so we have to wait for a solicitor to turn up.
‘A straightforward job can take hours for all the officers involved and so arrests late in the day are avoided,’ says the officer. ‘But, by the end of the financial year in March, it’s all about spending money: our bosses are desperate to get rid of any under spend. There is usually a feeding frenzy in March by officers in my force fighting for overtime.’
And, as the recession bites the financial divide between the haves (the drugs gangs) and the have-nots (the police) widens. A survey carried out in 2011 found half of all police forces in England and Wales admitted they would have to scale down their efforts to catch drug dealers because of shrinking budgets196. Tactics worst affected will be those seen as having more long-term and deeper benefits, such as intelligence gathering, covert surveillance and forensic analysis.
Back in the northern coastal town, it is not just endless cuts to resources – the drug unit has been cut by a half in under ten years – that handicaps drug officers. In a case that still leaves the town’s drug team spinning in amazement, officers were delighted to find a ‘copybook’ drug den during a raid that ended a ten-month investigation into a professional outfit which had set up shop at a local drug user’s flat.
Police burst in and collared one of the main dealers. On a bureau in the front room sat a large mound of heroin, a razor blade, a rail ticket from his base in a nearby city to the town (used to scoop up the heroin), a set of weighing scales, small drug-deal bags, made-up wraps and around £500 in crumpled £10 and £20 notes. The icing on the cake was a notebook detailing all the deals that had been done that day, listing what drugs had been sold to whom and where. Everything was covered in fingerprints. ‘The local lad even admitted that he had been putting the dealer up and “serving up” for him,’ says PC Copeland. ‘It was a hook, line and sinker case, something out of a police training manual at Hendon,’ he says. ‘Case closed? Not at all.
‘The dealer was charged with conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. But the jury finds him not guilty. They believed his story, that he’d come up to our town to buy a car but had ended up being locked in a stranger’s house after trying to buy some cannabis,’ says PC Copeland, laughing. ‘He somehow convinced the jury that the reason his fingerprints were all over the drugs, bags and scales was because he picked them up out of curiosity. We were devastated, you don’t get a more cut-and-dried case than that – and yet he walks away. We were left thinking why do we bother?’
Even in inner-city areas, drug enforcement is a low-visibility activity which the average citizen will be unlikely to witness. There is a vague public perception, largely shaped by fictional portrayals and by stories in the media, that drug police are hard-bitten mavericks who ply their trade in the chaotic and violent margins of society, using their cunning to take out low-life pushers and big-time villains. But, although the job is punctuated by a string of disappointments and brick walls, PC Astley does not see her quarry as the modern-day folk devil featured in public discourse.
‘There are two things that have surprised me about the people I’ve been chasing over the years. First, that these people are not idiots; it’s a clever business. Secondly, while there are some pretty nasty pieces of work out there, some of them are just ordinary people. Behind every user and runner, there’s a story,’ she says. ‘A lot of people say drug addicts and drug dealers are scum of the earth, but they don’t know anything about them.’
Although drug policing is a seemingly glamorous and exciting role for a police officer – with proactive investigations, search-warrant busts, surveillance and a large degree of autonomy – most of the drug squad’s time is spent scrolling through intelligence databases and catching up with paperwork. Matthew Bacon,197 a law lecturer at Sheffield University who embedded himself with drug police units around the country, has written a thesis on police drug law enforcement on the streets. ‘While they see more action than most police and get the chance to put together cases from the first raid to the court, the time these officers spent on the street was actually very little. The drug police and the drug dealers and the drug users existed in entirely different worlds – occasionally their paths would cross.’
Peter Gair, a senior CPS advocate who has put together scores of cases against drug dealers around the UK, is philosophical about the endless stream of dealers passing through the system. ‘In theory, putting198 dealers in jail is supposed to deter other dealers. The simple fact is: money can be made by selling drugs. As long as there is demand there will always be a supply. Like working on the production line, the quicker you work, the more you get rid of, but whether our efforts are reducing the amount of work I don’t honestly know. If we didn’t do our job it would be a lot worse. But are we actually getting anywhere, are we reducing the problem, are we just delaying the inevitable? I try not to think about that – it could be very depressing if you come to a certain conclusion.’
For PC Astley, it’s the buzz of getting a result that keeps her motivated. ‘It’s a game of cat and mouse. That’s how I’ve always looked at it. It’s my job to catch them and it’s their job to get away. If they do get away I know I’ll catch them next time. I don’t get upset or angry. It’s not personal. It’s frustrating, but what keeps me going is the hit of a good result.’
There are darker arts that police must use in order to land a heavy blow on drug organisations. Police know that in the criminal world, loyalty is fickle and everyone has a price, especially if their liberty is at stake. Lowly gang associates and acquaintances have a reputation for ‘taking one for the team’ and doing time in jail rather than confessing all. But police know that for every ultra-loyal associate, there will be several who can be persuaded to drip-feed inside information. Catching dealers selling drugs and working out where the day’s stash is kept are commendable results. But it is only when police are able to penetrate the outer layers of foot soldiers and accomplices that an area’s drug trade can be disrupted at any kind of meaningful level. To do this, police must place themselves within the drug underworld and into areas of policing that remain shrouded in secrecy and controversy.
‘It is no good knowing that people are drug dealers, you need to know the specifics – what is going to happen at what time, and that’s where informants come in,’ says Peter, a former drug-squad detective199. His first informant offered up the address of a prolific cannabis dealer in exchange for being given bail on a charge of credit-card fraud. Soon, he had a constant drip-feed of information, given to him by around a dozen registered informants, which was crucial to building up a picture of the local scene. When he wanted to befriend someone he knew held valuable information, he would conspire to ‘bump’ into them in the street, at court or in custody suites. One man Peter had been looking at for some time, a familiar face in a gang which ran the crack trade in a large English market town, was recruited days after his car broke down.
‘I was driving around and spotted this guy on the side of his road with his head in his car bonnet. I walked up to him and his face dropped because he thought I was going to hassle him. I offered to give him a push and a lift home and he was gobsmacked. He thanked me and I said no problem. Then a week later I get a phone call, he wants a chat.
‘He gives me the low-down on this rival crack-dealing gang. Who does what, the hierarchy, phone numbers, how they are planning to spread the trade into the next town. He opened a window on to a world that we might never have known. He was our eyes and ears on that firm, and we managed to bring it down as a result of his information.’
Each year police200 forces hand over around £6 million, in amounts between £50 and £100,000, to a network of 5,000 registered informants, known officially as CHISs (Covert Human Information Sources). The vast majority of intelligence gathered from informants, around three-quarters, is about drugs, and police admit they have more intelligence on drug dealers, often provided by addicts, rival dealers and disgruntled partners, than they know what to do with.
But drug officers are now forbidden to handle their own informants, since the introduction in 2004 of an imaginary ‘sterile corridor’ between specialist informant handlers and the officers who act on the intelligence, enacted after mounting instances of violence against informers whose identities have been leaked. While the new system has tightened security, some long-serving drug squad officers admit that its sanitisation has resulted in less reliable, and less fruitful intelligence.
When all efforts to gather evidence against crucial targets have failed, police will attempt to infiltrate their network using specialist undercover officers, a role made infamous in recent years by former undercover detective Mark Kennedy, whose close relationships with women while infiltrating environmental protest groups caused outrage and the collapse of a trial in 2010. Kennedy cut his teeth as an infiltrator of drug gangs before he targeted protest groups.
Police have had many successes by embedding undercover officers in drug organisations, but nevertheless it is a risky strategy prone to the occasional disaster. Two undercover officers posing as crack-cocaine dealers were shot by Birmingham Yardie gang members during a set up ‘drugs deal’ in 1994 when the bag they were handing over was opened to reveal bundles of banknotes stamped with the words ‘WEST MIDLANDS POLICE’.
It was into this highly dangerous line of work that, in the early 2000s, Peter became submerged, after impressing senior officers with his ability to blend into the drug scene. He spent eight years in deep cover as a drug dealer, moving across various forces and parts of the country, working his way slowly and patiently up the drug chain until he was able to get to those in a position of power. His expertise at keeping his nerve in the face of what were some of the country’s most violent drug dealers, earned him the respect of his seniors and the nickname ‘Donnie Brasco’, the undercover name of an FBI agent who infiltrated the Mafia as jewel thief in the late 1970s and helped put more than a hundred leading Mafiosi behind bars, among his fellow detectives.
One of Peter’s most high-profile cases involved the son of a Jamaican gangster who had recently retired after a long and profitable drug career in a major northern city. Tyrell was twenty-one years old. Despite his youth, he controlled most of the area’s crack and heroin trade, and was selling approximately £1.8 million of the drugs each year. With a growing reputation for extreme violence and a terrifying arsenal of weapons, he had become number one target for the area’s organised-crime unit. But all attempts to generate evidence against Tyrell, including the targeting of informers and use of surveillance, had come to nothing. So Peter was dispatched to gather evidence against him. It was a job that lasted over a year and a half.
‘He was paranoid about direct involvement, even his runners wore ski masks,’ says Peter. ‘His gang bought pay-as-you-go mobile phones and changed the number, the SIM card and the handsets every two weeks. He was a very cautious, streetwise, entrepreneurial young man who controlled people a lot older than him through fear and violence. He was ferocious.’
Peter set himself up in the area as a heroin user and sub-dealer who bought in bulk, claiming he sold the drugs on to dealers in a nearby rural town. It was only after six months and around thirty transactions that his runner took off his ski mask. Meanwhile he heard reports of the violence meted out by Tyrell to those who crossed him. One unfortunate runner was stripped and locked in a room with two baited pit bulls. His badly mauled but still alive body was dumped in full display in the high street as a warning to others thinking of ripping off the gang. At a meeting with a target one night, Peter heard that Tyrell was lying low after shooting a rival dealer while he waited in his car.
Around twelve months into the operation Peter made the breakthrough he had been seeking – he had heard on the grapevine that Tyrell had a weakness: gold.
Peter started using gold jewellery instead of £700 or £800 lumps of cash in return for his regular packages of heroin. When Tyrell heard about this, as Peter had hoped, he took a personal interest, wanting to inspect the goods and pick out his favourites. Every time they met it was in an alley and Tyrell was never close to any heroin. When Peter failed to turn up with the gold one day, Tyrell’s frustration led him to calling Peter on his personal mobile phone. The evidence gathered from the secret footage and recordings made by Peter, and from monitoring Tyrell’s phone were used to secure a conviction.
Peter never carried a firearm and he never took drugs, nor did he get close to any of his targets. ‘They were people I had no real affinity with, they were people who did not flinch at extreme violence, whose job was to make a living from drug addiction.’
In one northern city suburb he worked his way up the chain and befriended its leader, a Yardie named Tony, who ran a firm from the attic of a heavily guarded café situated in a no-go area for the public or police. The first conversation that started their friendship was about the superior taste of a particular chocolate bar.
As a result of their friendship Peter would always be given the best deals. One time Tony summoned him up to the attic room at the dealer’s HQ. Certain he was going to be rumbled, and planning his only route of escape – jumping into thin air through a closed window – he was shocked to see his dread-locked friend holding a baby in his arms. ‘He just wanted to show me his baby, because he liked me and trusted me. I almost fainted with relief.’ In the end his cover remained intact and the gang was taken out. ‘Tony was stunned at the revelation that one of his customers was an undercover cop.’
Peter says his time as an undercover drug detective was a period of ‘intense pressure’ for which he received little reward, and from which there was little respite. Not only did he narrowly escape being stabbed to death in a back alley by someone who had stolen his ‘stash’, there were many times when he would be discovered, and possibly killed. On one occasion he was bundled into the boot of a car, driven to waste ground and stripped of his clothes because drug dealers were sure they would find a tape recorder. It was one of the few occasions he was not wired up.
It was not only the criminals that made his life difficult. ‘It made me realise how bad cops can be to drug addicts. I was abused, assaulted and threatened with being fitted up by having drugs planted on me on a regular basis,’ says Peter. Undercover policing is a risky and expensive strategy. That officers are regularly exposed to high levels of danger by infiltrating drug gangs, by essentially double-crossing people who have track records of violence and homicide, is an indication of the level of threat that police believe the drug trade poses to this country. And while drug organisations may tie up a deal in an evening over a handshake and a few drinks, for the police to catch them in the act, and to relieve them of their profits, can run into months and years.
‘It took us201 two years’ work to be able to take those pictures,’ says a senior detective in the bowels of Scotland Yard, pointing to a selection of police photographs of a Ferrari, a large bundle of ¤500 notes, a shipment of cocaine and a revolver. One of the Met’s most senior money-laundering intelligence officers, he is talking about Operation Eaglewood, Scotland Yard’s largest-ever simultaneous raid in 2008 which led to the final jailing in 2011 of thirty-three gang members – including a firefighter commended for his actions in the 7 July tube bombings – and the closure of the London hub of a money-laundering and drug-dealing network which distributed over £100 million worth of cocaine annually.
Operation Eaglewood was significant because the man at the centre of the drug ring, whose connections stretched to Colombia, Spain, Israel, India, Dubai, Morocco and other North African states, was a forty-seven-year-old Palestinian called Eyad Iktilat. He was not only the money man, but the middleman connecting drug gangs across the UK. ‘We were monitoring a meeting between two drug gangs when a man turned up we had not seen before,’ says the detective. ‘So we started to look at him to work out who he was. We thought we might eliminate him in a week or so if nothing came up.’
But something did come up. A lengthy surveillance operation revealed that Iktilat’s business, Royal Oak Taxis, on the face of it a run-down taxi-repair garage with metal shutters and a corrugated iron roof beneath the Westway flyover in Paddington, west London, was in fact a ‘one-stop shop’ for a vast money-laundering network. Iktilat was also a director of the nearby Euro Foreign Exchange, through which up to £1 million a day in drug money was laundered.
Millions of pounds in cash and drugs flowed through the garage’s shuttered doors as the gangs used it as a ‘clearing bank’. Teams of runners, or ‘money mules’, dropped sackfuls of sterling to be exchanged at 5 per cent commission into more easily transportable ¤500 notes – since banned from circulation in Britain because of their appeal to drug dealers – at the nearby foreign exchange.
‘Iktilat was in the middle. Everyone else was on the periphery,’ says the detective. ‘Like the capital’s diverse population, there were so many nationalities involved in Operation Eaglewood: Egyptian, Irish, Scottish and Palestinian. They found each other by word of mouth. Differences in ethnicity or religion don’t matter when it comes to making money.
‘We had to trace every transaction, join every dot to get the complete picture,’ he explains. ‘It was an exhaustive investigation, but necessary, and worth it in the end. Not only did his assets include the Ferrari, but also a Bentley, and a £750,000 plot of land in Malaga where he was planning to build a £2 million villa. We could have wrapped up the case a lot quicker, but we wouldn’t have taken out the network, from the very bottom to the top. Iktilat was the top guy and he got thirty years.’
The Met’s money-laundering unit say their work is the purest form of policing. ‘Financial investigation is the last bastion of proper investigation,’ comments a detective from that team, ‘because you take it from arrest straight through to court. We build up the intelligence picture, we follow the money trail, we deal with every aspect of the court case and conviction and then we carry out the investigation for the confiscation order. When you are doing this there is a pride in it. That’s why we come to work. Yesterday I seized a Bentley convertable. £75,000 worth of car, that gave me a buzz. Satisfaction is when you hand back mansions and villas bought by criminal proceeds to the local authorities in Spain or Ghana and know that when that drug dealer comes out of prison he won’t be flying out to a swimming pool at his palace, he’ll be applying for a council house. That’s what gives me the buzz to carry on. They can do their time, but they don’t like paying for it. POCA allows us to do this properly.’
As was the case in Operation Eaglewood, detectives are increasingly finding that those who have the ability to turn tainted cash into usable assets, the money men, are often the spider at the centre of the web. They represent a key service industry for the modern drug trade, which by its very nature relies on cash. The practice of disguising or ‘cleaning’ illegally obtained money to make it appear legitimate is an essential part of business.
Banks are required to contact the authorities if their customers deposit more than £10,000 in cash. Because drug firms would alert the police to their business by doing so, they must find ways to introduce their money into the legitimate economy by whatever means possible. The more complicated the trail, the less likely money assets can be traced back to the street.
Britain’s number two in the fight against organised crime is Andy Sellers,202 Deputy Director of SOCA. He says the new anti-money-laundering powers have already been used to help convict some of Britain’s biggest crime lords.
North London gangster Terry Adams, who built up an estimated fortune of £200 million through a vast racketeering and drug-trafficking empire, was jailed in 2007 because he could not account for his wealth. The prosecution case was that Adams made around £11 million from crime by the age of thirty-five, then retired and began laundering the proceeds. The laundering was mainly conducted through the creation of sham companies that claimed to hire Adams as a consultant, giving him a modest taxable income. The funds were also invested into properties, antiques, offshore bank accounts, a yacht and several cars. Adams was released in 2011 and immediately embarked on a spending spree, for which he almost returned to jail. Under POCA rules Adams must declare everything he buys that is over £500.
Glaswegian gangster James Stevenson, nicknamed ‘the Iceman’ because of his cold and calculating cruelty, was given a twelve-year sentence for money laundering in 2007. His organisation was linked to the importation of drugs from South America, Africa, Turkey and Europe, and the investigation into his organisation’s affairs has led to the seizure of more than twelve tons of drugs and the arrest of seventy-one people. Stevenson had previously been arrested on suspicion of murdering another crime boss. But he was jailed only after police discovered evidence of money laundering over a three-year period, chiefly through the acquisition and re-sale of fifty-five high-value watches, and the purchase of a fleet of cars registered in his wife’s name used to run a taxi service.
‘Chasing the money has a greater impact on disrupting the cycle of business than chasing the product,’ says Sellers205 over a coffee in SOCA’s discreet HQ in Southwark, south London. ‘That is where we can hurt and disrupt gangs the most. We can force people into living “pay-as-you-go” lifestyles because they know there is a chance if they don’t spend it, it’s ours. Lots of criminals live hand to mouth, because of our efforts to locate and seize their assets. We are finding fairly sophisticated criminals who live in very basic houses and drive ordinary cars – all their money is going on holidays and fast-living abroad once they have smuggled the cash out of the country.’
But today, money-laundering scams are as varied as the make-up of the drug firms themselves. Methods include breaking cash up into small amounts and placing it in bank accounts (known as ‘smurfing’ because the sums are small and easily hidden); buying goods that will not depreciate in value such as special-edition Rolexes and vintage cars; washing it via high-street businesses (most commonly pubs, clubs, nail bars and beauty salons), using the hawala banking system, an informal system of transferring money used for centuries in the Middle East and South Asia. Other organisations gamble online and deliberately lose to an accomplice, or simply stuff a suitcase with cash and take it abroad. Police once found £50,000 in a washing machine in the back of a lorry en route to Europe to be ‘cleaned’.
‘The easy part of the trade is buying drugs and selling them,’ says Detective Sergeant Simon Marsh,203 of Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Directorate’s Payback Unit. ‘It’s dealing with the cash that’s the hard bit. If you want to get large amounts of money to be made to look legitimate then cash businesses are the way forward. And the best cash businesses are high-street stores. The amount of money that’s declared to the revenue is significantly more than the actual profit. Overnight that drugs money has become part of the legitimate economy; you’ve paid your VAT and now you can do what you want with it. The cynical policeman would say most of these businesses in London – nail bars, hairdressers, tanning salons – are laundering money.
‘There has been a move away from traditional investment in property; it’s less of a good option today. Now it’s more common to move money out of the country using places like Western Union. Pre-paid cards are another new trend. Put £5,000 of credit on the card, leave the country and when you’re abroad, take out the cash. The company charges you 1.5 per cent, so they make money. These cards, unlike cheques, aren’t classed as cash under seizure legislation. We’ve stopped people with shoulder bags containing 200 of them. The same person can order lots of cards out, or use stolen identities to avoid suspicion. The company gets £5 for each card so they don’t care who buys them, no checks are made. It’s just like the oyster-card system: charge them up, and away you go.’
In the chase for the money, police have even resorted to putting up posters, featuring a man wearing a suit, dark glasses and decked out in gold jewellery, with the message: ‘Too much bling? Give us a ring’, asking for the public to be on the lookout for flashy drug dealers. Tellingly for the police’s new direction in hunting down the proceeds of crime, British Transport Police has begun training its army of sniffer dogs to detect not only the odour of cocaine, cannabis, heroin and ecstasy, but also large quantities of banknotes.
As with the drug dealers on the street, the higher echelons of the trade are cunning, careful, adept at avoiding detection and always inventing new ways of staying one step ahead of the law. As with policing the trade on the street, and despite POCA and the Crime Mapping Project, it is a battle in which police find it hard to make any headway.
Despite new legislation and increasing powers, the ability of police and intelligence agencies to stem the flow of drugs into the country from abroad is severely limited, not just by the scale of the task, but by the unwillingness of some regimes to play ball. Operation Westbridge,204 a £1 million British-run mission to stem the flow of drugs from Ghana, which had become a major new drug route for South American cocaine, has been beset with problems such as local drug police actively helping traffickers by sabotaging expensive scanning equipment and tipping them off.
It is a game our senior drug gang-busters admit they are losing. ‘There are many things that make this an uneven battle,’ says Sellers. ‘The big players are cash rich and connected. We can’t match them from a resource point of view – they have an unfair advantage. And when we get the key players the peripheral figures will morph themselves into a new gang.
‘And just as you think you are beginning to understand the machinations of one trade, something else will come along. We were gaining a foothold in the cocaine trade when the online market emerged. You need a completely different sort of investigator for this – not accountants or undercover officers working the streets. There are fundamental changes occurring not only to the drug trade but also to how we can police it. What are they going to do? These are very interesting times to be writing a book on the drug trade in this country.’
What is being done to police drug trading on the web? In its submission to the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry on drug policy in 2012, SOCA said that between 2010 and 2011, 120 websites selling mephedrone and naphyrone had been closed down as a result of SOCA action.
But police admit they are perplexed by the battle ahead. ‘Police officers on both sides of the Atlantic say the same thing,’ John Carr, an Internet security adviser to the British government and the United Nations, told the BBC. ‘We don’t have enough courts, we don’t have enough judges, and we don’t have enough police officers to tackle the real scale of illegal behaviour on the Internet. What that means is increasingly we’re going to have to look to technical solutions, we’re going to have to look to the Internet industry to help civil society deal with this really enormous problem the dark web206 has created.’
In truth, most of the illegal activity on the Internet, especially that which is encrypted, remains beyond the reach of the police. The right to private communication is enshrined in US law, while the ability to remain anonymous was a key weapon used by pro-revolution bloggers during the Arab Spring. Despite the challenges faced by the police and UK Border Agency in stemming the drug trade, they have a considerable list of successes on their CVs. Moreover, chasing drug criminals has dragged policing methods into the twenty-first century, having led to many major innovations across the board. Forces recognise the benefits of harm-reduction policies and that police have a role in helping people addicted to drugs, rather than merely arresting them.
As expert players of the long game, as many locked-up drug dealers know, enforcement agencies will eventually get their man. While it is accepted that senior drug figures see being caught and losing their liberty – and now their riches – as an occupational hazard, the continued efforts of the police ensure that the day-to-day existence of many drug criminals is an uncomfortable one, more so than many would be prepared to admit, dominated by a constant need to watch your back, to guard your conversations and to distance yourself from everyday life.
Yet police know there is only so much they can do, that they cannot win the game and that they have to manage the drug trade, rather than drive it away for good. The modern era of drug policing looks set to be a very different one to the days of the maverick drug squad detective in the 1980s. Now the focus, especially for local and regional forces, will be to operate at the level of a public service duty. If there is a specific problem that the public want to get cleared up, the police will respond.
This new way of doing things was revealed in an event that appeared to turn into Britain’s first drug-bust safari, as dawn broke on a dark December morning in 2011.
Around 150 local schoolchildren, community workers and senior business leaders stood bleary-eyed and shivering in a warehouse in Manchester. Sharing the room with 1,000 police officers, many in riot gear, the locals listened to a briefing by a senior officer about what they could expect to see on the trip around some of the less salubrious parts of the city. Operation Audacious was, he said, the biggest ever operation against drug dealers in Manchester, and onlookers would have a ringside seat as officers raided the homes of one hundred suspects.
Then the police’s guests piled into a fleet of hired minibuses to begin the slow crawl at Safari park speed behind a procession of police vans and officers on foot, into the habitats of drug sellers in Manchester, Bolton and Stockport. As the journey began, Operation Audacious, or #OpAudacious as it was known on Twitter, was launched in a multimedia publicity whirl worthy of the launch of a new pop band.
A press release, Facebook page, flyers and a YouTube video, as well as the Twitter feed, were launched to promote the tour. Senior Manchester police figures were at pains to stress that this was an action brought about as a direct result of public concerns and the wishes of the community. The biggest ever drug bust in the city’s history was prompted by, witnessed by, and for the benefit of the public.
The raids began. Peering through the minibus windows, the passengers looked on as suspected drug dealers were dragged out of their freshly broken front doors in various states of undress, blinking under TV spotlights, and into the back of police vans.
Back at the warehouse HQ, a bank of huge TV screens showed the live action as officers dressed in riot gear entered a drug safe house in the suburb of Cheetham Hill. And, complete with the odd rebellious tweet, #OpAudacious was all over Twitter:
#OpAudacious taking place today across Manchester. GMP will be executing approximately 100 warrants on suspected drug dealers … more to come
#opaudacious is now trending in #Manchester
Chief Supt Jackson: ‘Today’s strikes will have caused significant disruption to the users and suppliers of drugs in Manchester.’
On display in Piccadilly Gardens a BMW M3 that was seized from a Drug Dealer. #OpAudacious http://pic.twitter.com/MZoOYFUB
#OpAudacious reminds me of that episode of The Wire where the low rises are raided to please the Major, without actually achieving anything.
#OpAudacious update 72 arrests. Seized thousands of pounds cash, £2k of class A drugs, 15 blocks of cannabis, 20 bags of cannabis.
Find out more about today’s #opaudacious raids targeting drug dealers with this video: http://youtu.be/IMRgz6V0MY0
Very proud to watch Greater Manchester Police in action today.
#OpAudacious is exciting, keep the updates coming.
According to the Greater Manchester Police, the raids resulted in seventy-two arrests (with twenty-five being the average age of the suspect), £2,000 of Class A drugs seized, including fifteen blocks of cannabis, twenty bags of cannabis and a cannabis farm, a handful of stolen jewellery and a batch of stolen meat.
It would have taken months of planning and hundreds of hours of police and court time, but to Greater Manchester Police it was job done. The public asked for these dealers to be swept up and so they were, in a very public fashion. But, as Damon Barrett207 of the Harm Reduction Alliance said: what would a cost-benefit analysis of this operation and the laws and policies that underpin it conclude? ‘Operation Audacious is representative of the positive feedback loop we’ve gotten ourselves into where fighting the drug trade is success enough. It is an expensive and circular dynamic which can lead nowhere in the long term.’
Britain’s drug police are unkindly sandwiched between pressure from the public, media and politicians to stamp out the drug trade – or to at least appear as if they are – and the endless chase to catch the fox-like figure of the modern drug dealer. And although police put a brave face on it – whether that is in the hope they can outwit the drug gangs or out-resource them – there is something fateful about their mission.
Enforcement, at a global and national level, has had an impact. It has helped to shape the modern drug trade. Clampdowns have forced criminals to adopt new products, trafficking routes and production methods. But from the 1960s to the present day, as the emphasis has switched from chasing the criminal, to the product and then to the money, the battle against the drug trade has always been about chasing shadows.
The police accept that although they can partially dent and disrupt the drug trade they can only displace it, not defeat it. So the mantra of modern drug policing is damage limitation.
The focus of drug policing appears to have come full circle, back to the day-to-day policing of local communities. In the wake of the appointment of new, locally elected police commissioners, local drug chiefs will have to be seen to act swiftly in the face of public concern – reducing fear of drug crime, protecting communities from drug-related nuisance, minimising threats to public health.
So if police get a call about dealers selling drugs in a park they will act on it. As with a request from a resident for the council to come and pick up dumped rubbish, the police now look set to become a public service to be ‘called out’ to deal with nuisance drug crimes by the most vocal sections of the community.
But even this moderate aim may prove tough for the police to put into action. Since the 1960s, largely due to stop-and-search tactics, the policing of countless national strikes and protests and the demise of the beat bobby, law enforcement has become an institution that has lost its connection with local working class communities.
To the modern police force, if a crackdown on dealing in a public place leads to a favourable story in the local paper and the dealers switching their business operations to a private house, then that can be seen as a result.
It is perfectly reasonable for communities to want to be able to carry on their lives without bumping into drug dealers at every turn. The police, short on resources and fighting a woefully uneven battle against an array of powerful private businesses, know that they must pick their fights carefully. Focusing on the more visible manifestations of the trade diminishes some of the harm caused by the drug economy. However, as Britain’s police chiefs are well aware, in the background the drug businesses are left to flourish unchecked. While the police have been forced into thinking local, the drug trade is becoming increasingly global.