An “epidemic of organised crime”: the challenge facing Britain’s police

Faced with new threats from international gangsters, the boss of the National Crime Agency, Lynne Owens, thinks UK policing needs a radical reboot. Alex Perry reports

One afternoon last April, as we climbed into an armoured car outside her office in Vauxhall, southwest London, I asked Lynne Owens, the country’s most senior police officer, to describe 21st century crime in the UK. Her answer spanned most of the next two hours, as we crawled east through the traffic to Chelmsford, Essex, where, as head of the National Crime Agency (NCA), she had been invited by the Policing Institute for the Eastern Region to give a lecture on the future of law enforcement. There was Russia’s attempt to kill Sergei Skripal. A North Korean cyberattack. Eastern European slave traffickers. Albanian cocaine smugglers. Hundreds of billions of pounds laundered through London every year. A dramatic rise in the murder rate in the capital in four years. Historic child abuse in Rotherham. Fentanyl manufacturers in Merseyside and Manchester.

All the cases Owens cited were examples of organised crime, illicit national and transnational networks that have multiplied since the 1980s and now make an annual £1.5trn around the world and £37bn, or 1.8% of GDP, in Britain. It was to tackle this threat that the NCA was established in 2013 as a national intelligence and police force – inevitably described in the press as the closest thing Britain has to an FBI. What to many might sound like a terrifying catalogue of crime, then, is to Owens, as the NCA’S director general, a to-do list. Since we spoke, Owens’s caseload has expanded again to include investigations into the origins of Brexiter Arron Banks’s campaign cash and how an Azerbaijani banker’s wife, Zamira Hajiyeva, sustained a lifestyle that ran to spending £16m in Harrods in a decade.

That evening, addressing senior officers in a half-empty lecture hall in Chelmsford, Owens said much organised crime in the UK operated all but unchecked. Partly that was because there was so much of it. In her car, Owens had told me that the NCA’S latest figures showed there were 4,629 criminal gangs and syndicates in Britain, employing 33,598 professional gangsters – numbers that become astonishing when viewed in context. The figure of 4,629 means there are more gangs in Britain than staff members of the NCA; 33,598 career criminals translates to more gangsters in Britain than belong to all three big Italian Mafia.

Owens’s speech, however, was concerned with why organised crime was so rampant. She said one big reason was that the police services, as currently constituted, were not up to the job.

“We need to fundamentally re-examine the policing model,” she said. An ancient and fragmented structure of 43 English and Welsh county forces, some of which date back 190 years, has left Britain with little to no “capability to respond” to modern, global criminals. Without wholesale change, she added, “we are going to get left behind. We need to move.”

Owens is 49 and close to six foot tall. Her toothy grin, lanky gait, south London accent and taste for pink trouser suits belie her position as a star officer at the peak of a 29-year career at the sharp end of British law enforcement. As a junior officer in London and Kent, she pursued murderers and armed robbers. While a senior leader of the Metropolitan Police, she led the operation to shut down the 2011 London riots. In 2016, she was promoted from chief constable of Surrey to the NCA, and her job became chasing the most dangerous criminals of all: traffickers (of drugs, guns and people), fraudsters, the corrupt, cybercriminals, money launderers and child abusers.

In her three years at the NCA, however, Owens’s role has often seemed to be evolving into a larger, more urgent one: to wake up Britain to how it has quietly become a hub for international organised crime; and to persuade the politicians and the public of the need to transform Britain’s police so that they can counter the new threat. Not that Owens is trying to make waves. She eschews controversy, taking care not to issue statements that might embarrass political masters or upset county colleagues, through whom, as a national agency with fewer officers than West Yorkshire police, the NCA is mostly obliged to work. Instead, her views have emerged piecemeal over several years, in asides and remarks buried in speeches, interviews and public discussions.

A consistent theme of these appearances is that Britain is a country in profound change. “This is a shift, not a spike,” she has declared repeatedly. Although she avoids stating outright that the police can’t cope, another of Owens’s favourite refrains is that the service’s current structure and funding lacks cohesion, and is wholly out of date. All of which poses an urgent question: if police and politicians can agree that Britain’s police is broken, why is no one fixing it? For the NCA, and Owens, there is a more existential challenge: can a single young and underfunded agency solve Britain’s epidemic of organised crime?

Popular perception of organised crime in Britain is anchored in fictional portrayals such as The Godfather, or historic villains like

“An ancient and fragmented structure of 43 English and Welsh county forces has left Britain with no capacity to respond”

the Great Train Robbers – and there was once some truth to these legends. In the past, crime gangs tended to be hierarchies based around family or ethnicity, making money from robbery, protection, casinos and wartime black markets. In the 1980s and 90s, gangland transformed. An explosion in counterfeit goods and drugs – particularly cocaine – and an eased flow of money, communications, commodities and people propelled the rise of flexible, horizontal criminal networks that displaced small family operations. According to the last Home Office National Security Capability Review, organised crime has since “grown faster than any country has been able to respond to it”, and now has “a daily, corrosive impact on our public services, infrastructure and reputation” sufficient to endanger national “security and prosperity”.

While these new forms of crime defy old stereotypes, for those who know where to look, signs of it are all around. Every year, Britons unwittingly drink millions of bottles of untaxed Italian wine, smuggled in by the Calabrian Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta. Farmers and owners of empty factories who wake up one morning to find their land buried under tonnes of rubbish are victims of an illegal waste disposal industry worth billions a year. Owens points out that when you get your nails done cheaply in a new salon, or your car washed by hand at one of thousands of pop-up garages in car parks across the country, there is a good chance that you are being served by someone who has been trafficked. Many of the workers picking fruit and vegetables on farms across the UK are also indentured labour. The NCA registered a 35% rise in reports of slavery in the UK from 2016 to 2017. In the cities, ex-military eastern European and Baltic state gangs are behind a spate of thefts of prestige cars stolen at night, driven to the ports and dispatched overseas before the owners wake up. In the countryside, other groups target agricultural machinery such as mini-diggers, which they break into parts and export. In August, the Met revealed that in the past two years it had arrested 75 Chilean burglars flown over by unidentified Latin-american bosses to break into upmarket British homes. Ironically, the gangs were targeting exactly the kind of anonymously owned, often empty investment properties that the NCA sees as plain-sight evidence of the hundreds of billions of illicit pounds being laundered through the UK every year.

Technology has enabled whole new illegal industries. Fraud, mostly online, is at an all-time high of 3.4 million thefts of a total of £193bn in 2017. Wannacry, a piece of North Korean ransomware, paralysed much of the health system for four days in May 2017, and online child sex abuse rose 700% between 2014 and 2017; it now draws a British audience of 80,000, equal to the entire UK prison population.

Perhaps the most visible manifestations of organised crime are the violent turf wars between drug gangs, which help explain how homicides in London had hit 123 by 19 November last year. Deaths from drug misuse, too, are near an all-time high – partly due to the introduction of ever-purer cocaine and fentanyl, which can be 100 times as strong as morphine – killing 2,503 in England and Wales in 2017. The NCA is also grappling with “county lines”, the term they give to a new tactic of urban gangs expanding into small towns. The NCA previously identified more than 1,500 such operations, earning £3,000-£5,000 a day, but Owens recently put the figure even higher, at nearly 2,000.

To career officers, the explosion in organised crime is no surprise. Britain’s police have fretted for more than a decade about their inability to catch organised criminals. Denis O’connor, then inspector of constabulary, noted in a 2005 report that while overall crime was falling, organised crime was rising steeply, but that “typically less than 6%” of crime groups were targeted by police. Why? Because, in some cases, to outwit a fractured police service, all a criminal needs to do is cross a county border. And because, by popular demand, the police have remained resolutely local.

By its very nature, says Mike Levi, government adviser and professor of criminology at Cardiff University, organised crime is rarely as visible or disturbing as the disorganised variety: public drunkenness, say, or noisy neighbours. Even if police are asked to address it, they are generally tasked with tackling the symptoms – knife attacks, a drug squat – not the cause. “What a lot of people want out of their police is local attention,” Levi says. “That’s got nothing to do with the work of the NCA, and from the public’s perspective, that’s perfectly reasonable.” And since police legitimacy depends on delivering what the public wants, says Levi, what we have had until now is “a local police… that’s no help at all in dealing with transnational organised crime”.

A significant obstacle to Owens’s ambitions is that she heads an agency established, at least in part, as a cost-saving exercise. In 2006, the National Crime Squad was expanded into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which in 2013 grew into the NCA. With 4,200 staff, including 170 overseas, and professionals from the police, intelligence, academia and social care, the Government presented the NCA as an expansion. Really, it was a contraction. Although it absorbed most of the functions of Soca, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, the Missing Persons Bureau, and parts of the National Policing Improvement Agency and the UK Border Agency, the NCA inherited only half their funding. Today, its annual budget of £454.4m is only 3.7% of Britain’s annual spending on the police. Its budget will be cut by £10m in 2019.

A Home Affairs Select Committee hearing on the future of policing last June was Owens’s best platform to date to wake up the country to organised crime and the related crisis in its police. She had significant support. Police minister Nick Hurd told the committee that the main problem with Britain’s police was “how you drive change across a fragmented system”. Appearing alongside Owens, National Police Chiefs’ Council chair Sara Thornton and the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Cressida Dick, agreed with the need for more centralisation.

When the committee published its report in late October, it agreed that “the current allocation of responsibilities in policing at a national, regional and local level is broken, and in dire need of review”. But perhaps because a group of politicians was always going to champion local policing, the committee concluded that the solution to crime in 21st century Britain was a better neighbourhood service. Not once during the time Owens sat before them did a single politician even utter the phrase “serious and organised crime”.

A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian. © Guardian News and Media 2019.

“In the cities, ex-military eastern European and Baltic gangs are stealing prestige cars and dispatching them overseas”