Introduction

“I know it when I see it” – these are the famous words US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to define hard-core pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184, 1964). The phrase was Potter’s attempt to categorize an observable fact or event – in this case, pornography – when that category was subjective or lacked clearly defined parameters.

This book asks whether ‘I know it when I see it’ has become a problem in the context of county lines drug dealing. No two county lines are perfectly alike, but they are all defined in roughly the same terms that privilege certain concepts, borrowed from psychology and public health, like ‘child exploitation’ and ‘vulnerability’. There is now a ‘standard story’ (Pfaff, 2017) about the causes of county lines and the profiles and motivations of their protagonists and antagonists that has become a way of seeing (for a discussion, see Spicer, 2019). However, as Pfaff (2017) demonstrates in the context of mass incarceration, standard stories not only tend to limit knowing something when you see it, but also might prevent us from seeing it at all. The standard story is not ‘wrong’ per se; rather, it captures very legitimate concerns. The problem is that it emphasizes those concerns at the expense of other things, things that potentially matter more when it comes to problem solving.

The ‘county lines’ concept first appears in a National Crime Agency (NCA) intelligence assessment published in 2015, based on 2014 ‘returns from police forces following the circulation of a national intelligence requirement … information from the Home Office Gang and Youth Violence front line team, force problem profiles, subject matter experts and academic literature’ (NCA, 2015: 2). Readers of that original ‘threat’ assessment will observe that discussion of the ‘national issue’ of county lines, which ‘almost always involves exploitation of vulnerable persons’ and the ‘essential feature’ of ‘mobile phone lines’, has hardly changed at all in years since (NCA, 2015: 1).