'County Lines' Related Drug Supply Arrests of Juveniles

Keywords

County lines, Drug, Supply, Arrests, Juveniles, Recorded, Offences, Heroin, Cocaine, Class A, Cannabis, Ketamine, Amphetamine, Class B, Steroids, Youth, Supplying, Controlled, Substances.

Publication Number

PUB 1430

FOI Reference Number

16543

Request Title

'County Lines' Related Drug Supply Arrests of Juveniles

Date Range

2017 to 2021

Information Requested

Please provide the following information, per calendar year, for the years 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Q1• How many drug supply arrests of juveniles aged 16 or under have been recorded that are deemed to be "County Lines" offences? Could these figures be broken down by year, please?

Q2• If your Force does not distinguish drug supply offences as "County Lines" or not then please supply the information in question 1 as generic drug supply with an offender aged 16 or under.

Q3• How many County lines arrests of juveniles under the age of 16 have been recorded for class A/B/C drugs? If possible, please supply numbers for heroin, cocaine, other (class A); Cannabis, Ketamine, Amphetamine (class B); Steroids, other (class C). Could these figures also be broken down by year, please?

Q4• If your Force does not distinguish drug supply offences as "County Lines" or not then how many drug supply arrests of juveniles under the age of 16 have been recorded for class A/B/C drugs? If possible, please supply numbers for heroin, cocaine, other (class A); Cannabis, Ketamine, Amphetamine (class B); Steroids, other (class C). Could these figures be broken down by year, please?

Disclosure with Exemptions

Part Disclosure with Section 12 Exemption

Information Correct as at

30 May 2022

Date of Disclosure

15 June 2022

Related Documents/Links

N/A

FOI 16543 Response

Questions 1 to 4 cannot be disclosed to you as the data is not held in a format that allows for all information to be extracted and verified within the time and cost limits under the act.

To explain, the method of recording, and the requirements relating to the recording such matters, has changed over the last decade and so to extract the data requested would require the manual examination of all cases involving arrests for 2016 and 01/01/2017-31/03/2017.

Each case would take approximately 10 minutes to establish the facts, therefore, to repeat this task over the vast number of arrests made would exceed the time and cost limits.

Questions 1 and 3 – recording systems do not allow the filtration of youth involvement with ‘county lines’, therefore each individual arrest record and investigation log would need to be reviewed manually as above.

Caveats:

The data are from 01/04/2017 as all custody records for arrests are not available before this date because the previous custody system is no longer supported. For consistency Essex Police only included records from later systems.

The basic count tab represents all Drug Supply arrests in the requested period i.e. one record for each arrest. The Breakdown totals are higher than the number of actual arrests as many offenders supply more than one type of drug, therefore one arrest record can have multiple counts, (different drugs supplied on one record).

Outside of the obligations of the act – and in an effort to assist we can advise:

The below table shows the number of arrests of children under 16 years for supplying controlled substances per year:

Year	Grand Total
2017	15
2018	18
2019	26
2020	56
2021	53
Grand Total	168

The table below shows the breakdown of different controlled substances per arrest of under 16’s per year:

Drug	Grand Total
2017	317
Cannabis	52
Class A	57
Class A - Other	58
Class B - Other	6
Class B or C	20
Class C - Other	3
Cocaine	35
Controlled drug	17
Crack cocaine	28
Heroin	35
MDMA	6
2018	386
Cannabis	59
Class A	75
Class A - Other	79
Class B - Other	2
Class B or C	21
Cocaine	33
Controlled drug	20
Crack cocaine	47
Heroin	49
MDMA	1
2019	367
Cannabis	63
Class A	63
Class A - Other	84
Class B - Other	4
Class B or C	27
Class C - Other	1
Cocaine	30
Controlled drug	31
Crack cocaine	24
Heroin	35
Ketamine	1
MDMA	4
2020	422
Cannabis	61
Class A	48
Class A - Other	72
Class B - Other	10
Class B or C	23
Class C - Other	1
Cocaine	35
Controlled drug	65
Crack cocaine	50
Ecstasy	2
Heroin	55
2021	335
Cannabis	49
Class A	40
Class A - Other	65
Class B - Other	8
Class B or C	9
Cocaine	20
Controlled drug	67
Crack cocaine	40
Ecstasy	2
Heroin	35
Grand Total	1827

Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.