Inside the posh UK town being ripped apart by drug gangs | UK | News

With its stunning Victorian architecture, tree-lined avenues, and reputed health-giving spa waters, Harrogate, in North Yorkshire, has been a desirable destination for people to live and visit for centuries. It’s often voted one of the happiest places to reside in the UK and has been dubbed ‘the third poshest town’ in  the country, behind Henley-on-Thames, and Bruton in Somerset.

But this beautiful gateway to the Yorkshire Dales is attracting more than one kind of high society, as organised criminals have increasingly seen a relatively affluent population as an easy target for the so-called county lines drug dealing scourge.

North Yorkshire Police’s Head of Major and Serious Organised Crime, Detective Superintendent Fionna McEwan told the Express her patch had seen an “explosion” of cocaine and “more younger people using ketamine”, as well as drugs gangs using more sophisticated methods online to sell their illegal wares. But lessons learned on the well-heeled streets of the spa town are now set to be rolled out nationally as the force has pioneered “ground-breaking” new tactics to help protect the public and bring the Mr Bigs of the drug gangs to justice.

New tools include a dashboard which allows officers on the ground to instantly call up data which sets out a map of wherever they are with key locations connected to the narcotics trade. And a partnership with the University of York means it takes just 48 hours to test deadly high strength drugs which have hit the market, compared to months for a test result nationally.

North Yorkshire Police have enjoyed some recent big successes, smashing two major county lines operations called the Jerry Line and Teddy Line in the past two years, as well as carrying out raids on 36 addresses across the county this month. In April four members of a county lines gang with Albanian connections jailed for cocaine and cannabis supply, were ordered to pay back more than £115,000 from their ill-gotten gains under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Ringleader Ermal Biba was found to have a house and other assets in his native Albania.

“The reality is Harrogate and North Yorkshire is a nice place to live, and it is a safe place to live comparatively, but the flip side of that because of the slightly more rural nature and the demographics, and because of the forces, the county areas, that border us, particularly West Yorkshire, it has for quite a long time been a target for county lines drug supply,” T/Det Supt McEwan explained.

“I do think there is sometimes a perception that we don’t really have those sorts of problems, but unfortunately we do, there is a drug market and it’s quite a lucrative one.

“There are different sorts of markets, there is the heroin and crack cocaine class A drug market, that more kind of ‘traditional’ drug user that exists and a lot of county lines and drugs supply networks will deal to those individuals, but the explosion as we see it is that kind of cocaine night-time economy, ketamine use which is expanding and consequently we are seeing the drugs supply networks locally shifting, because it is a lucrative market because of the money that exists in some of our communities in some of our North Yorkshire towns.

“We are seeing more (ketamine) and we are seeing it shifting into a younger age bracket, which additionally has some really serious health implications around the impact to their bladder and other organs within their body. It is still not on the same scale as other drug use, but the intelligence picture is developing and we are seeing it more.”

Harrogate, which is ringed by pretty green common land called The Stray and hosts the world famous Betty’s Café Tea Rooms, is just 19 miles and less than an hour’s drive from the very different surroundings of inner-city Leeds and Bradford.

And it’s from the metropolitan sprawl of these West Yorkshire cities that organised drug gangs have repeatedly launched their sinister web of drug dealing towards rural Yorkshire, often snaring the young to operate as dealers, or by taking over homes of the vulnerable as bases for their operations, in a practice known as cuckooing.

But it’s in the teenagers and young people who fall prey to the web of the county lines gangs who can suffer the most, and not just from falling foul of the law.

Ben Nelson-Roux, from Knaresborough, a town just three miles from Harrogate, was forced by dealers to transport and sell drugs after he fell into debt having first tried narcotics at the age of 12.

Ben was found dead by his mother, Kate Roux, in a hostel at the age of 16 in April 2020.

Speaking to ITV in 2023, Kate said her son “was a really vulnerable child who was exploited and manipulated.” Elsewhere in Britain, 18-year-old Jade Hutchings, from West Sussex, took his own life in May 2020, after also being exploited by county lines crooks.

T/Det Supt McEwan said the organised criminals have a modus operandi that uses the “trafficking and exploitation of the young people” to deal drugs.

She added: “Consequently, we have done quite a lot of work in the partnership that we have, Project Alliance, which is the kind of local community safety partnership.

“To tackle organised crime we do a lot of work within the partnership to raise awareness within our communities to generate that kind of intelligence but also the people around them, inclusive of their own children, for any signs that they might be being exploited or involved in drug supply.”

In terms of the national war on drugs, North Yorkshire has become a canary in the mine for the ongoing problem across Britain and it’s the combination of a community approach, as well as new tech, that is making the force stand out as a good model for others to follow, with conversations with other police authorities now underway.

“We’ve developed the serious and organised crime dashboard, which is a mapping tool that maps live time all incidents and all intelligence that relates to organised criminality and drugs supply, which means that any frontline officer can open that mapping tool and get a 360 understanding of the context that they’re operating in,” T/ Det Supt McEwan said.

“For example, when they’re walking down the street, they would be able to bring up the dashboard and see that’s where an organised crime group member lives, that’s where there is a cuckoo’ed address, that’s where we’ve got some risk around exploitation.

“If you imagine a Google map and you see those different coloured dots, those dots represent different things… it might be drugs supply intelligence, it might be an arrest for drug supply, it might be an organised crime member living there… and it creates this map and you click on this particular dot and it will explain to them what that is, it gives them this view of the context in which they are policing which is really hard to get otherwise unless they sit down and trawl through all the intelligence and all the incidents which happen in a particular area, which as you can imagine for a public service that is working to large volume… that’s quite difficult for them to do.”

The SOCD tool is set to be mentioned this year by the College of Policing as an example of best practice.

Another area where the force is ahead of many others is the use of the North Yorkshire Drug Analysis Project (NYDAP) which works in partnership with the University of York.

T/ Det Supt McEwan said there were just two police forces in the UK that had access to quick test results on substances, after overdoses or spates of fatalities among drug users.

She said: “What we’ve got in North Yorkshire is ground-breaking, if for example we went to an overdose, or a drugs death, usually we would seize that drug and we would send it for forensic analysis, which unfortunately because of pressures on the system takes months to get a result.

“We’ve worked with groups like Horizons, a drug support group, in developing this relationship with the University of York so we can take a sample from the scene of a death or an overdose, take it to the university lab and they will analyse it and have a result with us within 24 hours.

“This then allows Horizon and other drugs support networks to warn local drug users, public health and partners, and shape a response, we had a series of deaths, there was a big spike in Humberside where they had a lot of overdoses and we actually supported them with NYDAP so they could identify what was in the drugs make up so they could then do a lot of preventative work, and they go those results really quickly.

“Most of our frontline officers also now carry naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose, and they can administer that to the opiate user, and it’s already saved a number of lives in North Yorkshire.”

NHS– www.nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support/drug-addiction-getting-help/

FRANK – drug support helpline and information – www.talktofrank.com

Catch 22 – Providing specialist support and a rescue service for young people and their families who are criminally exploited through county lines – www.catch-22.org.uk