'He stabbed me in the head first... on these streets, EVERYONE gets stabbed': JASON FARRELL concludes his chilling exposé of the casual savagery of the county lines drugs trade 

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In the final part of our series, as young people all over Britain fall prey to a plague of knife crime, JASON FARRELL uncovers the terrifying use of these weapons in the spread of county lines drug dealing. 

Lee — that’s not his real name — is furious and indignant. I’ve run into him while in Southend-on-Sea as part of my investigation into county lines drug running and, while we talk, he pulls back his dark-grey hoodie to reveal a still-healing red gash across the top of his shaven head.

He says: ‘I was standing outside of my block with my boys and this bloke came up behind me and stabbed me in the head with a cut-throat razor blade. Then he stabbed me in the fingers, armpit, shoulder, arm and back.’

Lee — that’s not his real name — is furious and indignant. I’ve run into him while in Southend-on-Sea as part of my investigation into county lines drug running and, while we talk, he pulls back his dark-grey hoodie to reveal a still-healing red gash across the top of his shaven head, writes JASON FARRELL

He points to the sweatshirt he had on when he was attacked. There’s a hole in the back where the blade cut through.

‘Ruined my top. That’s the worst of it.’

Eighteen-year-old Lee says this without even a flicker of jokiness. It’s an indication of how casually knife attacks are taken these days.

‘Why did he stab you?’ I ask.

‘Some kid owed me 20 quid. So I took it. But the kid was this bloke’s runner, part of his gang, selling drugs for him.’

I ask: ‘So, he stabbed you to protect his runner?’ ‘No,’ says Lee. ‘Just to show principle.’ Then he looks at me as if there’s something I’m really not getting. So he puts me straight: ‘This is Southend, bruv. Everyone gets stabbed in Southend.’

Violence like this is at the very heart of the county lines operation, as an expert I turn to, Tony Saggers, Britain’s most senior drugs cop until he retired in 2017, later tells me.

The key to county lines, he explains, is that drug dealers in London and other big cities find that their markets are saturated with too many suppliers fighting over not enough customers. So they expand the geography of their operation.

But that means they need more people working for them out of town and they need to be firmly controlled.

Tony says: ‘Maintaining that control means the potential for violence is greater. These young people have to be coaxed and coerced to go out with the drugs, sell them quickly and get the money back to the central hub.

‘They are kept in check by fear. Because if someone oversteps the mark, and your reputation is that you will stab people if they let you down, then if you don’t carry out the threat, how do you keep control from that point onwards? It becomes a vicious circle. If one gang controls its drug markets through brutality, the others do the same in order not to look weak.’

Back in Southend, I go looking for members of the rival gang Lee mentioned and discover there are plenty of other kids who can show me stab wounds. One pulls up his T-shirt to show a wound with an entry and exit scar either side of his armpit.

The other kids laugh and jeer as he shows it off but I can tell a certain level of respect is granted him for his badge of honour.

Everywhere I go I discover this same casual attitude to violence. When youngsters I meet talk about a knife attack on someone, it’s just business to them.

They are utterly lacking in empathy. Violence is such a part of their regular digest that it no longer shocks them.

And, with social media, if a gang member misses an act of violence happening on their street corner, it’s OK because someone will have filmed it and they can watch it at their leisure.

They get to see it in slo-mo. They get to share the violence, or like the violence, or comment on the violence — or make drill videos where they can rap about the violence and threaten more.

As a result, tensions rise much more quickly and intractably. An argument that might have been settled in the street, in one bloody fight — possibly even in a murder — seems to perpetuate even beyond that.

Disputes take on a new life on Snapchat, on Messenger, on Instagram, in a high-production video on YouTube.

It’s as if these young people have become desensitised to actual violence, seeing it as no different from the Call Of Duty violence they control on their Xbox games. Or treated as points on the scoreboard that need to be evened up.

Violence like this is at the very heart of the county lines operation, as an expert I turn to, Tony Saggers, Britain’s most senior drugs cop until he retired in 2017, later tells me, writes JASON FARRELL (stock image)

What’s worse, because of county lines, it is being exported to smaller towns, such as Ipswich, where ten years ago you would never imagine gangs aping what they see in London, making music videos about selling drugs, scoring points and murdering rivals, and then actually doing it.

But that’s the point about county lines. They’re cancerous. Tony Saggers has no doubt that the situation is worse now than it has ever been.

‘There’s always been violence associated with drug markets but it has changed,’ he says.

‘A decade ago there might be the occasional ruthless drug dealer at street level who would carry a knife or even a gun but now there are more people out there with weapons and they are prepared to use them.

‘The business has become more brutal. Almost every week in 21st century Britain, some youngster is stabbing someone else of the same age to death.’

He likens what is happening to those child soldiers in Central Africa, who were forced to watch killings, sometimes of their own families, and then went on to do the same themselves.

‘What’s happening in county lines is the desensitising of children so that they will plunge a knife into someone else and kill them if necessary.’

There is plenty of evidence of this violent culture in Southend.

A young woman called Chloe tells me: ‘There are kids nowadays who walk around the town centre with a bag of drugs, a knife and a knuckleduster and think it’s appropriate — and these kids are 12 or 13.

‘You see crackheads everywhere, drug dealers, people carrying knives. It’s a horrible place to live.’

A young man called Kofi admits to carrying a weapon after people from London offered him the chance to sell drugs. ‘I’ve had to because of certain threats. I’m not looking to use it but if my life’s threatened, then I will. In a place like this, trouble seems to find anyone and everyone.’

Tony Saggers has no doubt that the county lines situation is worse now than it has ever been, writes JASON FARRELL. Pictured: Jason Farrell's Sky News report on County Lines

It’s the same in lots of other towns and cities, and getting worse, according to Lucy, who peddles drugs in Southampton for her bosses in London.

‘Southampton has more knife crime and London more gun crime,’ she tells me, ‘but the gangs are all upgrading now. A friend of mine was tasered by a gang member. And there’s a lot of acid. I’ve seen people carrying acid around to throw.’

Even more worrying were stories I heard from social workers in London about so-called ‘point-scoring’ — where gangs tot up marks for stab wounds to certain parts of the body. The going rate was apparently 50 points for a wound to the head, 30 for the chest, 20 for the stomach, ten for the leg and five for the arm.

Before his murder in 2018, a 17-year-old youth from Camberwell, South London, rapped about ‘the scoreboard’ in a drill video, which has had more than 300,000 views. Members of his gang, their faces covered with hoods, masks and scarves, were filmed rapping about ‘cheffing’ (stabbing with a long knife), ‘splashing’ (stabbing an enemy repeatedly until they pour with blood) and ‘capping’ (shooting someone).

A rival gang was goaded to ‘check the scoreboard’ and challenged, ‘How you gonna make it even?’ They answered the question by shooting the 17-year-old dead in retaliation.

A distraught youth worker told me: ‘Young people’s reality these days seems to be very warped when it comes to violence. They think it’s a game. Taking somebody out and killing somebody is now fun.’

Another who saw the Camberwell video believes a lot of young people feel pressured to put on a hard-man image. He adds: ‘They look tough in their videos but a lot of these kids are 13 or 14. They’re still watching Cartoon Network, they’ve still got Power Rangers bed sheets and are asking their mums to iron their shirts.’

Increasingly, these kids look on knives as the norm. On a rundown housing estate in North London, a group of young lads come up to me, along with the obligatory vicious-looking terrier snuffling the ground on the end of a heavy-duty chain and choker.

Six of them, aged between 14 and 16, agree to talk about how violence between gangs is on the rise. One tells me: ‘People are fighting for their territories, ganging up on each other, stabbing each other. But most of all, they are trying to make money by shotting — selling weed, class A drugs, white and crack.’

‘But why do you want a larger territory?’ I ask. ‘Why can’t everyone just stick to their own areas?’

The gang leader steps in and explains that ‘there’s not enough bread for all of us. Imagine an area where there’s about 30 shotters eating off the same amount of people. It just won’t work. So some people have to get taken off the map.’

But it doesn’t stop with one killing, as I learn from a tall, skinny kid. He says: ‘I was born here. I was raised here. If somebody touches me here, my whole gang is going to come to you. Your whole family’s getting killed.

Even more worrying were stories I heard from social workers in London about so-called ‘point-scoring’, writes JASON FARRELL. Pictured: Jason Farrell's Sky News report on County Lines

‘If you touch my bredrin, and if you touch him, him, him [he points to the rest of the group], I’m coming after you. Yeah, your whole family, your whole area is getting burnt down for my bredrin. I’ll kill you for them. You understand?’

I understand — but actually, I don’t believe him. I don’t reckon this 16-year-old kid would go on a killing rampage of an entire family. I do imagine, however, that he might get into some pointless tit-for-tat stabbing feud.

I turn to the smallest in the group — a slightly chubby kid with ginger hair who is 14 years old. ‘How about you?’

He says: ‘If I go out, I keep myself tooled. It’s like that. If I’m in my own area around the block, I’ve got my s***, I got my stuff. [He means places where he can stash his weapon close by.] But if I go out of my area, I keep it on my waist and nobody’s touching me. If somebody does, they get done. It’s like that.’

‘How old were you when you first started carrying a weapon?’ I ask.

‘Eleven,’ he replies. ‘When I carried the weapon, I felt safe. If I went to a different area, I was like, yeah, nobody is touching me now.’

I ask: ‘Was there an incident, something that happened that made you think, right, I’m gonna have to start carrying?’

He nods his head and tells me how he walked into another gang’s area and realised he had nothing to defend himself with if the people he saw came at him. It was a mistake he wasn’t going to make again.

‘Next time I walk through, they didn’t do nothin’. They saw me. They asked me where I’m from. I showed them I’d got a knife, and they had to back off. They knew from that day.’

We have a national emergency on our hands. This is the worrying conclusion I have come to after my in-depth investigation into county drug lines — detailed in the Mail over the past few days. What the experts tell me is that there is an urgent requirement to turn off the tap of vulnerable children who are exploited by the drug dealers as runners and mules. And that’s just not happening. It’s too easy to look the other way and pretend this is someone else’s problem.

Adults have an important part to play. A worried youth worker told me: ‘We need to start pulling the reins in. Parents always say “not my kid” but I say to them, “When did you last stop and search your kid to see if he was carrying a knife?” ’

Here are the signs to look out for, as outlined in a joint campaign launched by the council and police in Southend — a hotspot for drug dealers from London to sell their wares — called See The Signs.

The campaign warns that children as young as eight are being exploited from across all economic, ethnic and social groups. 

• A child persistently going missing from school or home or being found out of area.

• Unexplained acquisition of money, clothes or mobile phones.

• Excessive receipt of texts and phone calls and having multiple handsets.

• Relationships with controlling older individuals or groups.

• Leaving home or care without explanation.

• Unexplained injuries and suspicion of physical assault.

All of us need to be more vigilant. One of those experts who believes county lines is a national emergency is the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield. She reported last year that 27,000 children in England identified as a gang member and that the levels of violence are increasing.

‘Violence around county lines is extreme,’ she says, ‘whether to control the kids, or as an initiation, proof that you can be part of the gang. The stakes have escalated. A new norm has been created over the past five to ten years.’

Changes in education, social provision and policing have left a big group of children marginalised by mainstream society.

‘There are more at risk because school exclusions have rocketed, there aren’t youth clubs and the police have stopped local patrols — they are all in centralised offices that have no connection with the local community.

‘Safeguarding boards, too, have been stripped of the people who would know what is going on. We found only one in four gang members was known to the authorities.

‘Our new government needs to reverse all this. We need youth workers out on the streets looking for these young vulnerable kids to inspire them and reassure them, rather than leaving them to those who want to exploit them.’

Her solution is to take 30 to 50 areas of highest risk in the UK and put them into emergency measures for a year.

‘For a start, work out which kids are at risk, which is not difficult to do, and then provide help for their families. Help them keep their kids safe — and help them prevent the older siblings from getting the younger ones into the same situation.’

Targeting families with a history of domestic abuse would protect a great number of children and be very cost-effective.

Her next step would be to keep schools open in the evening and during the holidays.

‘We have schools everywhere. We pay for them. They are designed for kids and they are often shut. In the holidays, youth workers could use school premises to run sports and activities.

‘I would also set up a fund to create youth workers and to grow the numbers fast.’

She would flood schools with information about drugs and dealers, with particular attention to the crucial period when primary schoolchildren graduate to secondary schools and may need help to resist the blandishments of the gangs.

‘You combine all that with a package of support, so that when, for example, a child comes into hospital with knife wounds it triggers all sorts of interventions around the child and the family.’

Obviously all this requires serious money, Anne Longfield concedes, but recent polling shows that youth crime is a major concern among the public. ‘This Government is going to have to do more than just stop and search. It needs to introduce a whole new programme to reduce it.’

I agree. The attitude that we cut funding, then, when problems emerge, we increase police powers, is unsustainable. What is needed is serious, long-term planning.

The truth is that county lines are a symptom of the unravelling social fabric of the UK. In part, it is caused by austerity, reduced community policing, cuts in early years provision, dramatic reductions in youth services spending, parents falling through the gaps and leaving children living in more pressured and fractured homes.

More fundamentally, though, there is a contradiction in our society. We have the wealth to indulge in the recreational use of powder cocaine but at the same time the extreme poverty that drives people into heroin and crack addiction, and children into the clutches of the dealers.

Corrupted by the promise of a way out, they are exposed to drug-taking and brutalised by a world where disputes are settled with guns and knives.

But to stop it, we first have to understand it. A police officer at the sharp end of the problem in Ipswich told me: ‘You have to put yourself in the shoes — or the trainers — of these young people who get drawn into county lines.

‘For them drug dealing seems like the opportunity of a lifetime because the choice is set against poverty or abuse and isolation.’

I admit that I haven’t found the solution to end poverty but reinstating lost services would be a start.

To my mind, young people are currently an under- valued investment.

Like a good pension, the sooner you start putting money in the better.

We must do more to give children goals, skills, mentors, role models, education and hope. Otherwise, we’re just setting them up to fail.

Recently we have been so distracted by other things in our politics — but what could be more important than making this country a safe place for our children?

• Jason Farrell is Sky Home News Editor.

Adapted from County Lines: The New Breed Of Drug Exploitation Plaguing Our Streets by Jason Farrell, published by John Blake at £8.99. © Jason Farrell 2020. To order a copy for £7.20 (offer valid until January 25; P&P free), visit mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155.