- Conference
- 2025 National Black Members' Conference
- Date
- 7 August 2024
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
The Guardian published an article on the 19th of November 2023 which highlighted county lines strategy ‘cruelly targets’ Black youth and Black men in the UK
Home Office approach to tackling drug operations is based on ‘racialised tropes’, says new study
The findings, published by think tank the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), says the government’s claim that county lines is the “most violent and exploitative” drugs distribution model, requiring a multi-agency approach, is unproven. “There is a dearth of evidence to support the contention of an increase in the use and supply of [Class A] drugs as a result of ‘county lines’,” said the IRR study.
Niamh Eastwood, executive director of drugs charity Release, said the study highlighted growing concerns about the strategy: “The county lines narrative has been used by government and police as a contrived new threat that falsely and cruelly legitimises the targeting of racialised communities, especially of young Black children and men.”
The IRR tried to identify the ethnicity of people considered “at risk” of involvement in county lines by the Met, but said its freedom of information request had not been answered. However, available data indicates that, by 2020, of 3,290 people “having a link or suspected link” to county lines in London, 83% belonged to an ethnic minority.
The research, published 19th November 2023 in the journal Race & Class, adds that young Black people are up to six times more likely than any other ethnicity to be included in county lines safeguarding classifications. A national child safeguarding review panel also identified a concerning “over-representation” of Black boys in those considered at risk from county lines.
The IRR’s director, Liz Fekete, said the research should serve as a “wake-up call” to councils and safeguarding officials about the perils of being drawn into racial profiling. She urged them to urgently review procedures and databases. “We need to ensure that they are not complicit in a new form of criminalisation of Black and minority ethnic children, particularly those excluded from school, and/or in care,” she said.
Lauren Wroe, one of the study’s authors, said: “While we don’t see enough action from government on child poverty – itself partly the result of austerity politics – we have witnessed rampant campaigns against so-called grooming gangs, child traffickers and now county lines gangs.”
Wroe, assistant professor in the sociology department at Durham University, added: “The government throws these issues into the spotlight in an attempt to ramp up support for policies that are tough on crime and tough on immigration, while it fails to address the entrenched inequalities it has created over the last decade.”
Whilst the findings of the research is not new to Black Members it is time we use our Branches and Regional Management teams to accurately identify how many Black members families have been targeted by their local police force.
We understand that more white than Black people are in fact arrested which add more weight to the argument that Black people are targeted but without reason.
The statistics can be shared at the 2026 National Black Members conference with suggestion to members on how to address the issue?
We call on the National Black Members Committee(NBMC) to:
1)Work with the National Executive Committee (NEC) to coordinate Freedom of Information requests for all Police Forces to give information and statistics on the ethnicity of all those they have targeted through County Lines operations;
2)Develop a survey for all Regions to use to identify how many Black Members or their family members have been subjected to racist policing as part of a county lines operation;
3)Provide a report of the findings of the FOI request and their recommendations at the 2026 National Black Members Conference;
4)Lobby the government through Labour Link to effect the changes recommended in the report.
Please support this motion.
