Understanding and nowcasting the illicit drug distribution in England a data-centric approach to the County Lines Model

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Understanding and nowcasting the illicit drug

distribution in England: a data-centric approach to

the County Lines Model

Leonardo Castro-Gonzalez1, 2, ?

1University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK

2The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK

?l.m.castrogonzalez@bham.ac.uk

Abstract

The County Lines Model (CLM) is a relatively new illicit drugs distribu-

tion method found in Great Britain. The CLM has brought modern slavery

and public health issues, while challenging the law-enforcement capacity to

act, as coordination between diﬀerent local police forces is necessary. Our

objective is to understand the territorial logic behind the line operators when

establishing a connection between two places. We use three diﬀerent spatial

models (gravity, radiation and retail models), as each one of them understands

ﬂow from place ito jin a diﬀerent way. Using public data from the Metropoli-

tan Police of London, we train and cross-validate the models to understand

which of the diﬀerent physical and socio-demographic variables are considered

when establishing a connection. We analyse hospital admissions by drugs, dis-

posable household income, police presence and knife crime events, in addition

to the population of a particular place and the distance and travel times be-

tween two diﬀerent. Our results show that knife crime events and hospital

admissions by misuse of drugs are the most important variables. We also ﬁnd

that London operators distribute to the territory known as the “South” of

England, as negligible presence of them is observed outside of it

1 Introduction

During the last decade, a new illicit drugs distribution model has been developed in

the UK. The model was baptised as the ”County Lines Model” (CLM) by the UK

arXiv:2210.01182v1 [stat.AP] 3 Oct 2022

government [1] given its use of phone lines that are established between diﬀerent

counties. The problem has become increasingly worrying each year, becoming a top

priority for security agencies given the limited ability to stop them, and the modern

slavery and public health problems that the CLM brings to local communities [1,2,

3,4,5,6,7].

The modus operandi can be described in the following way: a central hub is

settled in big English cities like London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool,

from where drugs are sold and distributed [8]. From these hubs, lines are settled

to other parts of the country where a local market is established. So-called settlers,

ﬁnd a local accommodation (normally a ﬂat belonging to consumers) in the desti-

nation market from which drugs can be distributed. Local runners are then hired

to distribute the illicit merchandise to the consumers. Runners tend to be young

people with knowledge of the local market whose tasks are to deliver merchandise

and attract new clients. The distribution model increases the eﬃciency with respect

to “the traditional model” [8] where the “highstreet” illicit drug seller buys mer-

chandise to a bigger distributor, to then sell it on the street. The improvement of

the CLM is to merge both tiers (local and bigger seller) uniting both channels of

distribution (hub-settler and runner-consumer).

Local consumers are given a phone number where they can place an order. The

call is normally picked up in the central hub, from where they make the arrangements

to distribute it to the consumer via the settler and the runner. The settler travels

back and forth from the central hub and the local market bringing merchandise,

while the runner distributes to the ﬁnal consumer.

According to the National County Lines Coordination Centre [9], 3 cities account

for more than 80% of the detected County lines in Great Britain in 2019 and 2020.

These are, in respective importance, London, Birmingham and Liverpool. Public

data is scarce, only having detailed records for London for those two years.

The implications of the proliferation of the CLM in the UK are multiple. Three

are particularly highlighted in the literature [3,4,10]: (1) the rising of new illicit

drug markets in small coastal towns and rural areas of England where illicit drugs

problem were not found before. (2) Also, the involvement of young vulnerable

people in the distribution scheme is of worrisome for the UK Gov. This population

is the most prone to be caught by law-enforcement bodies, while being involved

in a modern slavery scheme making them hard to leave the CLM once they are

involved. (3) Finally, a limited ability from the diﬀerent police forces in England

to dismantle any complete distribution channel between one place and another.

Cooperation between diﬀerent law-enforcement bodies is necessary, as every link

in the distribution engine can work autonomously, making it hard for bodies to

dismantle the whole distribution operation.

The fact that county line operators are found in small villages and coastal towns,

far from local capitals and larger cities has risen diﬀerent hypotheses about the logic

behind establishing a line. Indeed, the size of the population of the target places

seems not to be a primordial element, as large population centres (London, Manch-

ester, etc.) do not attract a big number of lines according to public data shown in

the strategic report from the National County Lines Council [9]. According to the

same report, the logic behind the gangs operating county lines is a supply-demand

balance.

The main objective of this work is to understand the territorial logic that county

line operators follow to establish diﬀerent distribution routes. To do so, we have

to answer the question if the “traditional distribution model” has been broken as

literature suggests [5]. If so, which are the new social, demographic and economic

elements that are now taken into account to establish a new route? To answer both

questions would help to obtain useful information for the Metropolitan Police to

understand and tackle the county lines problem.

In order to answer the questions stated above, we test three diﬀerent spatial

interactions models to compute ﬂows from one place ito a second place j. We

understand each of these models as diﬀerent ways to understand the ﬂow of per-

sons/merchandise. Thus, by testing and comparing them we can extract information

about which mechanisms could county lines operators follow. The models we use are

the Gravity Model [11], the Radiation Model [12] and the Retail Model [13], taking

a similar approach as in [14] while extending it and adapting it to accomplish our

objectives.

We use the classic gravity model as our benchmark, as it understands the ﬂow

from one place to another as proportional to the respective populations and inversely

proportional to the distance between both places. Thus, we use it as a proxy of the

traditional idea stating that more population would translate into more demand for

illicit drugs. In that sense, a more populated city like Birmingham or Manchester

would be more attractive for county lines operators than other rural places at the

same respective distances from a given origin.

Radiation model understands ﬂows as a process of sorting the available opportu-

nities between iand j. To arrive to place j, the studied element (person/merchandise)

should not be captured by the opportunities found in the way to it. As an extension

of our benchmark, in this case we are interested in testing the distribution of popula-

tion in England. That is, for example, not only taking into account the population

of Birmingham and London, but also the population found in between.

Finally, the retail model understands ﬂow as a balance between the opportunities

and the costs of going from one place to another, compared with all the other

competing places in the given space. This latter model allows to test other kind

of dynamics involving diﬀerent beneﬁts and costs while considering competition

too. The diﬀerent beneﬁts and costs can be of physical nature (time, distance),

but also social or demographic. We explore ﬁve diﬀerent independent variables we

expect to have some leverage for operators. These are knife crime events, number

of police oﬃcers, gross disposable household income, hospital admissions by misuse

and poisoning by drugs as possible costs.

The hospital admissions are taken as proxies for illicit drugs consumption, as no

other data is available. In that sense, we are exploring correlations between other

social elements that might be of a higher importance for county lines operators to es-

tablish local markets. Knife crime events are another high-priority incidents for UK

Government [15], which are reported to be related to gang rivalry. We are interested

to see if the presence of this kind of event could be an element taken into account

for operators as a disincentive for establishing a local market. In the same way, we

are expecting police workforce to be a disincentive for gangs. Finally, we take the

gross disposable household income as a measure of richness, as average income does

not take into account regional disparities in rent prices, money transfers from the

government and local taxes. We train and test the three models with public data

from the Metropolitan Police of London [16] accounting the detected lines in other

police force territories in Great Britain from London in 2019 and 2020.

In the following, we present a small literature review in Section 1.1. The diﬀerent

models and data tested in Section 2. Results are presented in Section 3, to then

discuss and conclude in Section 4. We also present two Appendices Aand B. The

former is a table to help the reader with the models tested, while the latter details

the diﬀerent sources and formats of the data used in this work. To the authors’

knowledge, this is the ﬁrst published work that studies the County Lines Model

from a quantitative approach.

1.1 Related work

In the case of the County Lines Model, only qualitative and oﬃcial literature has

been published. The Oﬃcial literature includes documents and reports from diﬀerent

police agencies and the UK government. In particular, the NCA has published each

year a statement regarding the views of the organisation about the County Lines

Model [1]. The document presents the ﬁndings from the NCA to understand the

model and the diﬀerent consequence it has had in the population.

In 2019, the UK Government’s Home Oﬃce commissioned an up-to-date report

to be done around the illicit drugs problem in the UK. The report was published

in early 2020 [2,10] and reveals how the County Lines Model has evolved over the

last decade. It also reports how the consumption of illicit drugs has changed in the

population, stating that the UK faces an important challenge, as there currently are

two peaks of consumers: one in their 20’s and another in their 60’s. Each one of

those is of increasing worrisome, as the ﬁrst one is the future workforce of the UK

and the second represents an increasing pressure in the public services.

Two diﬀerent police organisations have publicly published information about

the County Lines Model information they have. These are the Metropolitan Police

of London [16,17] and the West Midlands Police (Birmingham and metropolitan

area) [18]. Only the Metropolitan Police has published quantitative data about their

detection of lines in other police territories.

In January 2018, a debate was held in the House of Commons (UK’s lower

parliamentary chamber) to discuss the exploitation and harms done by the County

Lines Model in London [19]. Diﬀerent Members of the Parliament asked what has

been done until that point to tackle the CLM problems in London, particularly gang

activity and exploitation.

Outside oﬃcial documentation, academic literature about County Lines has

mostly dedicated to report the child exploitation in diﬀerent locations of England

[3,4,5] and Scotland [20]. In all of them we ﬁnd a description of the model. An

anthropological study can be found in [21], where the authors interview diﬀerent

consumers and victims of the CLM in South England.

The present research is also found in the current context of need for better

information for law-enforcement bodies in the UK, as there is an ongoing discussion

about how Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic will have a major eﬀect on public

spending, particularly in law enforcement bodies and the National Health Services

(NHS, the public health body in the UK) [22]. In particular, reports state historical

maximum numbers of drug-related deaths per capita, as a new generation of young

consumers enters the market and an older generation requires more health care

services [2]. Also, it has been discussed how Brexit would make more diﬃcult for

the United Kingdom to access and proﬁt from European funding and infrastructure

(like the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drugs Addiction, EMCDDA)

for better intel and tackling strategies for a better public health and general quality

of life for its citizens [8].

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UnderstandingandnowcastingtheillicitdrugdistributioninEngland:adata-centricapproachtotheCountyLinesModelLeonardoCastro-Gonzalez1,2,?1UniversityofBirmingham,Edgbaston,UK2TheAlanTuringInstitute,London,UK?l.m.castrogonzalez@bham.ac.ukAbstractTheCountyLinesModel(CLM)isarelativelynewillicitdrugsdistribu-...

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Understanding and nowcasting the illicit drug distribution in England a data-centric approach to the County Lines Model

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