The British capital, London, faces an epidemic of knife crime. And on Tuesday, Cressida Dick, the head of the city’s Metropolitan Police, noted that a key driver of the violence is that which motivates much criminal violence in Latin America: drugs.
Watch what happened when LBC Radio’s Nick Ferrari asked whether middle class recreational (nonaddict) drug users have “blood on their hands.”
Dick is right. There is a legitimate debate as to whether legalizing and regulating sales of cocaine would increase supply and thus negatively price out criminal networks. Although I disagree with legalization, it is undeniable that cocaine provides criminals with an extraordinary opportunity for high, sustainable profits. In Britain, it is the incentive to protect cocaine profits which motivates violent interaction between different street gangs. And because firearms are difficult to access in Britain, the means of violence is focused on knives.
Yet, the particular nature of its cocaine market explains why Britain has more drug-related knife crime than other nations.
At the street supply level; those bringing drugs to parties, the drugs have reached the end of a very long supply chain. For Britain, the supply network starts with Latin American drug cartels, which smuggle their drugs across the Atlantic to West Africa and Spain on consumer goods vessels. Then European organized crime groups work with British national organized crime groups to bring the cocaine onto U.K. soil.
But even when British organized crime networks centered around London and Liverpool have pushed their drugs to an array of smaller regional suppliers, the supply chain isn’t completed. Because those smaller groups then provide the drugs to an even larger array of street gangs. And that’s where the problem of violence begins.
While the higher-up supply-chain networks are focused on covert action that avoids the attention that overt violence brings, and thus protects high profit margins, the street gangs are dominated by young men with a penchant for aggressive action and misplaced honor-based feuding. Add numbers of gang members and an abundant supply of knives to this mix, and you get both directed drug-trade control related violence and randomized (mugging, fight escalates) violence.
But the simple point is that in 2019, Latin American white gold remains a key ingredient in spilt British red blood. Much more will have to be done to stem the tide.
