Ministers vow to do ‘whatever it takes’ to get rid of gangland violence in Britain’s smaller towns
Amber Rudd has promised £3.6million to gather drug gang intelligence
MINISTERS will do “whatever it takes” to smash an explosion of gangland violence in Britain’s smaller towns, the Home Secretary vowed yesterday.
She vowed to target so-called ‘county lines’ where gangs courier heroin and crack to new markets outside of big cities.Children as young as 12 have been recruited to traffic drugs, using dedicated mobile phones or ‘lines’.
And the spread to smaller towns has been blamed for a huge rise in violent attacks outside of places like London and Birmingham.
Amber Rudd said: “The evidence we’re seeing is a different approach to drug dealing, a different approach to using children in the most disgraceful way as drug dealers.”
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Some £3.6 million of £40 million of funding to tackle serious violence will be used to set up a national county lines coordination centre to gather intelligence about drug markets.
A court last December heard how a teenager was trafficked to Swansea by a drugs gang and held in a house in the city and forced to look after a stash of Class A drugs. The police found her when they raided the house.
After luring her there, the gang members destroyed her phone and said she now “belonged” to them.