A drug dealer seen using a county line phone while on a train to east Kent was among those jailed following work by Kent Police’s County Lines and Gangs Team last month.
During May, the team made 18 arrests, secured 18 charges, recovered 10 weapons and seized around £35,000 in suspected criminal cash as part of their ongoing work.
Prison terms totalling 17 years were secured, including a four-year, one-month sentence imposed on Courtney Cann, who was part of the ‘Mikey’ county line which brought drugs from London to Thanet.
Investigators from the County Lines and Gangs Team identified a phone being used by the Mikey line to organise heroin and crack cocaine deals in Margate in January and February.
Officers managed to work out the times the drugs were being brought to Margate and compared that to train times. Further enquiries led to Cann being seen on CCTV on a train, using the phone which had arranged the deals.
He was arrested on Friday 11 March in Margate and charged with being concerned in the supply of heroin and crack cocaine.
The 28-year-old, of Beechfield Road, Catford, south London, admitted the charges and was sentenced at Canterbury Crown Court less than three months later.
The court result was among a number of outcomes secured by the County Lines and Gangs Team’s investigations in May:
- Aaron Clark, 26, of no fixed address, was charged with being concerned in the supply of crack cocaine and heroin following a separate investigation into the ‘Koby’ line in Medway.
- Jannai Johnson, 25, of Albion Drive, Aylesford, was charged with being concerned in supplying crack cocaine and heroin and possessing both drugs with intent to supply following an investigation into the ‘Ritchie’ line in Aylesford and Ramsgate.
- A 42-year-old woman, a 40-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy were arrested and bailed by officers investigating the operation of the ‘Milo’ line in Ramsgate.
Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Talboys, of the County Lines and Gangs Team, said: “Kent Police knows that the people involved in county lines networks are all too often the same people involved in violent and acquisitive crime around Kent.
“For that reason, and to spare users and their families the misery such drugs bring with them, we are determined to disrupt county lines groups at every opportunity and arrest and charge their members.
“The case of Courtney Cann shows the detailed investigative work that goes into bringing charges against drug dealers with the aim of securing jail terms which take them off the streets of Kent.”
Well done, great police work and this posting by Kathy and the police shows what the police are up against, let’s hope more arrests will be made in the not to distant future, keep up the good work.
Our relationship with drugs is a funny one in this country. Alcohol (which does more damage to our nation in terms of health and crime than any other drug overall is celebrated. Many families cant actually wait to take their loved ones out for a drink when they turn 18. People are even given awards for pouring the good stuff. Every other drug is like the demon. Alcohol companies have huge power over government policies for this to stay in place.
I dont agree with drug taking at all, but perhaps if we changed our perceptions perhaps we could take some of our issues better and stop handing over huge amounts of power to criminals and wasting tax payers money chasing the small fry at the end of the line.
Hope this is just the beginning o a massive crackdown on these lowlife morons
100% Big Chris, nice to see some positive comments on here about our Boys in Blue.
Sooo many people on here quick to complain about our police force doing nothing.
Correction, apologies, Boys and Girls in Blue
Disrupt being the key word, but it is the never ending circle-arrest these foot soldiers & lock them up for a short time-but there is a never ending supply of people like him & vulnerable children who often after being saved go back to it & it is back to business in a day or two for the bosses-there is no real disruption.
The answer to the drug dealing issue is clear & has been for a long time-legalise it, tax it & control it to put the dealers out of business & put more into education & trying to get people off it. Locking people up has failed miserably decade after decade, just like it has in the US since Harry Anslinger went on his crusade 100 odd years ago.
You cannot arrest your way out of it, all it does is make the PCC’s & politicians look good at re-election time with dawn raids being filmed with the Home Secretary in attendance. How long have we been hearing about disrupting county lines gangs now?
Totally agree
Not true Steve. Most People in the States that can legally purchase cannabis are still buying from street dealers as they are way cheaper than the cannabis shops. The reality is that the majority of people who use the cannabis shops in America are usually people who probably wouldn’t have tried it in the first place when it was illegal.
The vast majority of people will never try a hard drug as they don’t want the stigma of being classed as a junky or a criminal record for being caught. Take away the stigma and the chance of a criminal record and you will then have more junky scum.
Even Successful prosecutions like in this article usually result in pathetically low sentences. We need to Increase the length of sentences and increase the amount of dealers going to prisons.
Hard drug users are responsible for the majority of thefts and burglaries. If their drugs cost more they will simply steal more.
It doesn’t matter whether these people were locked up for 17 years or 70 years-it makes no impact on the continuing supply of drugs.
As we have seen from the lengthy sentences of the muppets who bring it through docks it doesn’t deter them, in fact the gangs factor in for seizures & will often phone the dock themselves to alert them to one of their couriers-he gets caught & goes to prison for a decade, while their other courier carrying a far bigger load gets through unscathed as a result & the stuff is on the streets.
How many more decades do you need to have of locking people up, releasing them, locking them up again & on & on until you try something different? The people here are either addicts themselves or small fry-they mean nothing to the people running these operations-these are hundreds & in bigger areas thousands of others lining up to take their place & the operation is back running smoothly within a day or so.
As soon as you take a drug dealer off a corner there is another one to take his place within a day. The police aren’t catching the drug barons & higher-ups, they are catching these disposable patsies.
Where exactly are you going to lock them up for so long? The jails are already overcrowded due to this incompetence of tough on crime & zero rehabilitation & ideas to change things to win votes.
Most people will want to get safe drugs that haven’t been cut with Fentanyl & other garbage by scumbags to save money & not have the cops busting them, you can work something out with NHS subsidies etc. Of course you will never stop it totally, but you will put a lot out of business & if more resources were actually ploughed into helping people get off them & tackling why people join these gangs in the first place then you start to turn the tide of young children running around carrying drugs for these groups.
I personally know two people who have had died after through heroin overdoses (brothers) They where scum. They used to break the door down of their mothers house and steal anything they could take. Their addiction ruined countless lives. Legalising hard drugs is not the answer. By legalising it you normalise it. Hard drugs should never be normalised. Legalising hard drugs would act as a gateway for a lot of people. When you have seen the harm that hard drugs has on families you would never condone it.
It is indeed a substance that drives people to desperate measures-try giving up all of the legal drug caffeine if you are addicted to it & see how your body reacts, or Nicotine-you will be climbing up the wall-difference is you can buy it legally in many places, an addict will then rob to feed their fix.
But then again you can get Heroin legally from your GP-the biggest drug pushers of all, so one might ask what the issue is?
Hard drugs are already legalised-from your doctor/the hospital & they kill people. What about alcohol & tobacco? Two of the worst drugs-but legal. Smoking will have killed a billion people by the end of this century & made their & countless other lives miserable through the damage it does.
Alcohol has led to countless deaths via liver disease, drunk drivers ploughing into people, pointless fights etc & both cost the NHS a fortune to treat. Why are these drugs fine & able to be bought from Supermarkets, corner shops, wine shops, pubs & clubs, yet another drug-many of which are actually far less harmful not allowed to be sold by Chemists or specialist NHS centres?
Or isit a case of my drugs-booze, fags, caffeine etc are fine & nobody should ever take them away from me, while looking down the nose at others who also have addictions that have been deemed illegal by governments, who have gone against the actual evidence provided by experts like Professor David Nutt & his team? Why is being put on Opioids by doctors something totally fine, but having the same substance from a non-legal source looked down on?
The big problem with street drugs is what they are being cut with in recent times-this actually puts people at incredible risk of harm & would be solved by legalising it. As said locking people up hasn’t worked for 100 years of doing it & never will.
It’s time to ban the gateway drug; tobacco!
Yes, it will have killed a billion people by 2100-but somehow that mass genocide is acceptable to most people.
Let’s just hope the lazy CPS and useless Judges do THEIR job
Legalise all drugs so they can be monitored,and distributed in the right way,also the government would make money in the tax side of things and the police can be concerned in more serious crimes, problem solved