This chapter walks readers through the first few days of drug sales in A-Town, emphasizing the tools, techniques and tactics our interviewees used to ship, store and sell drugs in the area. We discover that some drug dealers enthusiastically embrace the always-on culture of modern drug dealing and the use of smartphones and social media to reach customers, while others find delivery dealing a chore, and they only do it to keep up with consumer demands and customer preferences. The chapter also explores the dynamics of debt collection and conflict management in B-Town, and precisely why violence can be bad for business. These findings help flesh out the standard story of county lines by illuminating some of the dark corners of the practice and the strategic decision making that is usually shrouded in secrecy.

This chapter documents in vivid detail, the problem of violence in county lines and the events leading up to the end of the line in A-Town. The findings show that big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers; instead, they may have to learn to live with them. County lines drugs networks may be regulated by violence, but again, too much violence is bad for business, and if events away in the county sites threaten the gang at home in the hub, the gang will cut ties in the interests of self-preservation.

Playing on the immortal words of Ernest Hemingway, this chapter demonstrates how county lines can go bankrupt suddenly but more often gradually. This chapter highlights how personal pride and greed undermine group cohesiveness, and how lies and mistrust ultimately lead to the downfall of the criminal enterprise.

This chapter documents in vivid detail, the problem of violence in county lines and the events leading up to the end of the line in A-Town. The findings show that big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers; instead, they may have to learn to live with them. County lines drugs networks may be regulated by violence, but again, too much violence is bad for business, and if events away in the county sites threaten the gang at home in the hub, the gang will cut ties in the interests of self-preservation.

Combining a compulsive read with rigorous academic analysis, this book tells the real-life stories of drug dealers involved in county lines networks. This myth-busting, accessible book offers a new way of thinking about drug crime prevention, intervention and enforcement.

This chapter reviews the existing literature and ‘standard story’ on county lines drugs networks, which is rooted in the National Crime Agency’s first threat assessment of the problem in 2015. We examine how gangs, child criminal exploitation, technology, the legal and illegal economy, and other issues figure into the construction of county lines, drawing attention to not only the inherent harms caused by the growth of the illicit drugs trade in the UK, but also the gaps in our knowledge about how county lines really work. We discuss the risks of any narrow conceptualization of county lines, which contextualizes the current study and centres its contribution to the field. This chapter then introduces our data sources and methods, and outlines the case-study sites and interviewees that drive the book forward.

This chapter summarizes key findings from Contesting County Lines, such as: people migrate from ‘hub’ cities to ‘county’ sites not just at the direction of gang leaders, but for personal, family reasons; adults who have some existing ties to the ‘county’ areas, even local relationships within them, are chiefly responsible for the logistics on the ground; technology does not necessarily drive social change in drug markets, and mobile phones may not always make drug dealing easier; big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers, but rather learn to compromise; and some people enter into county lines of their own volition, fully embracing a life of deviant entrepreneurship. We conclude with a critical assessment of the county lines standard story, arguing that a medicalized view of the world and a well-meaning but narrow focus on ‘vulnerability’ and victimhood has contributed to a form of concept creep that may be deleterious to efforts to prevent and prosecute county lines. Implications for future research, policy and practice are discussed.

This chapter documents how people migrate from ‘hub’ cities to ‘county’ sites not just at the direction of gang leaders, but for personal, family reasons. The chapter thus demonstrates, following Maxson’s (1998) work in the US, how crime opportunities and drug market expansion may be secondary motivations for gang proliferation and gang member migration. The chapter explores how two unrelated domestic issues created the opportunity and incentive for our interviewees to ‘go county’. The findings thus challenge some of the standard story about the strategic origins of county lines drugs networks.

This chapter explores selection into county lines, including some of the subtler forms of coercion and exploitation that career criminals use to expand their workforce and influence in the marketplace. While the standard story on county lines emphasizes child criminal exploitation, this chapter finds adult offenders who enter into county lines of their own volition, fully embracing a life of deviant entrepreneurship. While some people are bullied and their houses are cuckooed, the findings here hint at the human agency that complicates the standard story about passive vulnerability in county lines recruitment.

There has been a plethora of literature detailing the detrimental impact of police stop and search tactics (S&S) on police-community relationships and police legitimacy, as well as recent controversy surrounding football policing in Scotland. Yet, the recent controversies, and subsequent reform of S&S in Scotland has yet to trigger any meaningful discussion about the use of search tactics at football matches. The aim of this research was to explore the relationship between S&S at football matches and police-supporter relationships. This research utilized qualitative methodologies in the form of semi-structured interviews with police officers and football supporters. This study found, that S&S, in the context of football, did not affect police-supporter relationships in the same way as traditional S&S. This paper offers two reasons: the difference in S&S implementation, and a broader acceptance of 'criminalizing' practice among fans wherein specific practices are perceived as the cost of participation in football fandom.

Post-industrial urban landscapes connected with neo-liberalism may provide novel opportunities for the emancipation of working-class women who were traditionally, like women of other social classes, largely subjugated to men socially and economically in the period of collective male-led unionization and manufacturing. Based on qualitative data, our interpretative study locates itself in an international field of criminality and illuminates the criminal practices of women connected with the criminal world of illicit drugs. Our contribution extends this field of scholarship into the culture of the West of Scotland. We identify through an intersectional sensibility of ‘doing femininity’ on the street and the nexus of a familial domicile, the ways in which women’s agency remains restricted, contrary to an emancipation argument. We conclude that their ‘liberation’ is negatively truncated for two reasons: firstly, criminality necessarily distorts freedoms and secondly, subtle ties with an overarching violent masculinity were retained.

Abstract This article focuses upon the recent emergence of the Dublin born musician, Imelda May, as a cultural icon in post-Tiger Ireland. May has become a significant figure in the recent socio-political remaking of ‘Irishness’, both globally and domestically, performing at the Year of the Gathering in 2012 and the Glaoch: The President’s Call in 2013. Following Bramall the article argues that Mays’s celebrity embodies a form of ‘disruptive performativity’ embodied in the aesthetic appropriation of austerity as an expression of feminine subjectivity. May’s self-consciously retro feminine aesthetic simultaneously problematizes and legitimates the structural inequalities and ideological constructions of Irelands recent economic past. The article concludes that May embodies a popular nostalgia for a radical, collectivist ‘Irishness’, while also manifesting the passive normalization of austerity within contemporary Irish cultural and political discourse. The postmodern historicity of May’s particular ‘retro femininity’ simultaneously locates her within contemporary discourse as a revivalist of conservative gendered identities and (post-)feminist revisionist.