The disruption of county lines drugs networks, the safeguarding of vulnerable children drawn into the operations and the prosecution of the organised crime individuals & groups operating the lines are key government priorities.
The criminal networks deliberately target children and vulnerable adults, to courier drugs from cities to users across the country. As a consequence the Home Secretary is investing £20m to identify and dismantle the gangs.
London is the highest exporting area for so-called County Lines Gangs.
This crime wave led to the inception of specialised investigation units, which have been tasked to focus on disrupting county lines criminal networks. The first team to go live operationally was the Op Orochi unit in The Metropolitan Police.
In order to help them meet their objectives, they have been provided with the latest innovations in digital forensic software including CSAS.
Communications data forms a major part of nearly all criminal investigations, and CSAS, developed by Forensic Analytics Ltd, is the market leading software solution that The Metropolitan Police chose to support their digital investigations. CSAS rapidly processes communications and other digital media, to assist analysts and investigators to rapidly analyse and investigate the huge volumes of data, generate outputs in evidentially reliable formats and support the prosecution of the criminal networks.
One of challenges of county lines investigations, is demonstrating the financial value and volume of transactions undertaken through a dealer’s “county line”. The manual analysis of this is extremely difficult and time consuming. Forensic Analytics who are recognised experts in automating comms data analysis offered their assistance.
The OP Orochi Unit set out their challenge, to estimate and attribute monetary value to the entire supply chain of the county lines, through the data contained on phones seized during their investigations. The Forensic Analytics research and Development Team, using their years of policing, analysis and data science experience, developed algorithms and tools to help the Op Orochi team, accurately assess the drugs revenue passing through the phone. This capability is now embedded in CSAS as a standard feature and available to all CSAS users.
As a result of using this capability in CSAS, Op Orochi, officers have successfully caused even greater disruption to criminal networks by identifying high volume dealers, attributing additional handsets used by the gangs and thereby able to calculate the drugs revenue which has resulted in increased sentencing tariffs.
The National Crime Agency, which jointly runs the National County Lines Coordination Centre with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, also use these advanced tools within CSAS to continue their investigations in pursuit of the county lines gangs.
Contact us to find out more if your force would also like to better understand the capabilities and benefits from the county line analysis solution in CSAS.
