Community experiences of serious organised crime in Scotland: research report

7. Conclusions and Recommendations

Overview

This chapter summarises key findings and offers related policy recommendations. While the study was not designed to evaluate current practice, the research design did include a community co-inquiry strand in which findings and possible strategies were discussed with a sub-sample of 33 participants and community stakeholders across the three fieldsites, including 11 community representatives, 17 statutory participants, and 6 from community justice (further detail is provided in the appendix). It was in part through these sessions that we were able to identify key implications and areas for future development.

Participants in all co-inquiry sessions endorsed the four key themes presented by the research team stemming from the study: wider disadvantage; the importance of crime 'stories'; helping vulnerable people; and barriers to service delivery. While the case study areas had traits that were similar to other communities in Scotland, however, it should be noted that these findings should not be read as a generalised picture of SOC-community relations in Scotland. While these themes were evident across the various case study locations, it is notable that there were differences in intensity between urban, semi-urban, and rural contexts. The intensity was highest in the urban embedded context and least intense in the diffuse location.

The chapter will be structured by the principal areas for recommended action, each including a brief summary of findings and recommended responses: The 5th D – developing resilient communities; ^[6] changing the narrative; addressing vulnerability; and broadening community partnerships.

1. Developing Resilient Communities

There was widespread agreement between all participants regarding the relationship between the embeddedness of serious organised crime and related forms of economic and social harm. All of the fieldsites experienced concentrated disadvantage, with a perception of stigma and stereotype, and with related feelings of frustration, anger and fear. The cumulative effect of these wider forms of disadvantage is a feeling of community disempowerment. This feeling of disempowerment is compounded by a lack of trust amongst some community residents in the police, and correspondingly a lack of community intelligence pertaining to organised crime. As a result of this disconnect, organised crime remains largely invisible, adding to a sense of its complexity and intractability.

Disadvantage provides the conditions that allow organised crime to flourish. Enduring levels of social and economic exclusion create populations with high levels of need and high levels of demand for state services, making them disproportionately vulnerable in the face of service and welfare cuts. Organised crime moves quickly to capitalise on these gaps and deficits, exploiting the vulnerable as victims and as low-level perpetrators.

Despite a clear need for improvement in services and opportunities, in all areas community residents demonstrated a strong level of attachment to, and investment in, their local area. In each case there were local groups and organisations that worked hard to engage with young people, to challenge stigma, and to create community cohesion. This was often hampered by lack of funding, investment and recognition.

Even in more remote, outlying areas, where SOC groups were not locally embedded, concentrations of drug use – with the associated reputational damage to those communities – was perceived as a threat to the future prospects and prosperity of these areas.

Recommendations

The current SOC strategy is framed by four strategic principles: Divert, Deter, Detect and Disrupt. This study recommends the addition of a fifth D – Develop – which is premised on community development as a means of responding to the harms associated with organised crime. Specifically, this should focus on developing community resources and local policing models to enable the gathering of community intelligence and increased trust in the police and other key service providers.

Community development should not be premised on tackling organised crime as a panacea to a community's problems, but rather, based on the assertion that efforts to tackle bigger issues of structural disadvantage are liable to fail if the barrier of organised crime is not tackled in parallel.

This approach recognises that the best asset in responding to organised crime is the community itself. Individuals involved in harmful, exploitative or coercive practices are deeply intertwined with the majority of law-abiding residents via families, friendships and other social connections. The implications of this should be further explored to help frame prevention, policing, and other responses which balance building opportunities for all in communities with rehabilitation and social support.

This cannot be achieved without corresponding investment in good place-based empowerment and planning, something which is understood in policy terms but often not accompanied by economic investment. This study suggests that grassroots, community-level work should be prioritised, rather than being led from outside the community. Organised crime should not be the only conversation in community development, but neither should it be avoided through an exclusive focus on more positive 'assets'.

2. Changing the Narrative

The study found a strong narrative supporting the persistence of organised crime in all case-study areas that was repeated among local residents and service providers but to a lesser extent those with lived experience of organised criminal activity. While local service providers saw the logic of participation clearly – 'flash cars', ready cash, and local prestige – the reality for those with lived experience was that only very few individuals attained material success without detriment.

The narrative presented in favour of organised crime is powerful and persuasive, particularly in communities with low levels of trust in the police and other state agencies, and this narrative is often supported by the media. This narrative presents an alternative way of envisaging the world in opposition to legitimate society, and has roots in truths about experience of disadvantage and myths about how it can transform relative life chances.

However, the study also identified an important counter-narrative. Organised crime results in a range of significant and enduring individual-level harms to those involved, ranging from victimisation and coercion to imprisonment and addiction, involving violent and often chaotic lifestyles. The likelihood of long-term success was comparatively low, with lower-level dealers used as 'cannon fodder' to support profits enjoyed higher up the food chain, often by those residing in more affluent areas. In addition, the study found that organised crime contributed to and exacerbated issues such as stigma, exclusion, and disempowerment at a community level.

Recommendations

At a national level, challenging the narrative of organised crime demands two shifts: first, a shift in presenting the issue as solely the preserve of law enforcement to one for the community at large; and, second, a shift in presenting organised crime as solely an issue for socially and economically disadvantaged communities to one that extends its reach to all areas of society, including those affluent communities where many 'successful' organised criminals reside.

At a community level, effectively challenging the organised crime narrative requires investment in a coherent, authentic and effectively targeted counter-narrative. This is likely to involve work which gathers the stories of those with lived experience of SOC and shares them as a preventative strategy in face to face contexts such as schools and through other means such as social media.

At an individual level, service delivery involving casework with convicted offenders, young people, and individuals on the 'cusp' of organised crime, should emphasise the distance between myth and reality in the narrative of organised crime at key transition points. Specifically, case work with young people identified as being vulnerable to SOC recruitment should be prioritised (for a recent overview see CYCJ 2018). Services such as diversionary youth work also need to be sustainably funded, credible and sufficiently attractive to provide a real alternative.

3. Addressing Vulnerability

A key finding from the study was that a strength of organised crime in communities was the knowledge of the 'landscape of vulnerability' in the local area – debt, addiction, ill-health, lack of family support, old age – and the ways in which these could be exploited by enlisting vulnerable individuals in illicit activity. In many cases this resulted in further debt, and a vicious cycle of harm.

The case study areas demonstrated high levels of vulnerability, offering a range of opportunities for exploitation. This knowledge of local vulnerability was supported by a flexible understanding of the changing structures of service provision and state support, and the ability to exploit new opportunities.

These coerced actions ranged from relatively small-scale activities, such as the watching of a 'bag', to larger-scale activities such as taking over the property of a vulnerable resident and using it as a base for criminal trade. In one case, fears of the financial impact of the bedroom tax among residents was used by local SOC groups to exploit older people and utilise their homes for criminal activity.

Drug prevention work was widely perceived as being too narrowly focused on older heroin-using/methadone-maintained drug users, with more emergent recreational and poly-drug markets not being effectively tackled. In particular, social media-facilitated school-based dealing was a frequent concern.

In the case of vulnerable migrant populations, exploitation was often hidden within particular populations, making it hard to identify and address. This challenge was compounded by an inability of victims to recognise or acknowledge their own exploitation; and sometimes weak relationships between migrant populations and the wider communities in which they were resident.

Recommendations

Local service providers dealing with various forms of vulnerability – particularly housing and social work – should develop strategies focused on the prevention of exploitation of vulnerable residents. Mapping and targeting support to the most vulnerable is a viable strategy with potential to create a significant prevention dividend. Partnership working and information-sharing on the issue of vulnerability and exploitation should form a key part of this strategy.

This requires a step-change in the way in which organised crime is envisaged: from a hidden phenomenon that is the sole responsibility of the police, to a public issue that is the responsibility of society at large. Communicating the ways in which vulnerable individuals are routinely exploited may be one way of creating this level of awareness.

Consideration should be given to legislative responses to create greater powers to respond to exploitation. One possible route would be to create a criminal offence of 'coercive control' similar to the recent UK legislation (2015: 3) on domestic violence: 'a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour.'

The current focus on harm reduction and health education in drug policy and practice is welcome but needs to be strengthened and broaden ed out to take proper stock of rapidly diversifying drug markets and drug using populations.

Given uncertainties in the current political and economic environment, and how this may impact on existing migrant populations in Scotland in the near future, careful monitoring is required of labour markets given the scope for exploitation of migrants to increase if labour shortages grow after the UK's probable departure from the European Union.

4. Broadening Community Partnership

The study demonstrated that despite hard work on behalf of all service providers, there were serious and significant barriers to effective service provision across police, social work, schools and housing. A lack of stability in funding and relationships were constantly noted as barriers to effective progress. These problems were rooted in a situation in which funding for addressing complex community needs involved a web of short-term funding schemes, with funding often appearing or disappearing rapidly.

While community organisations and statutory agencies worked on issues relevant to organised crime interventions, these were frequently framed in a different way; organised crime was seen largely as a 'police' rather than a community issue. As a result, there was both a disconnect in the identification of, and response to, organised crime among community and statutory partners. The fact that effectively securing help and resources in turn depended upon strong working relationships and trust made constant changes in personnel and organisations especially problematic.

A comparable level of disconnect was identified in information and intelligence-sharing between agencies. Housing services in particular were found to be a key source of local intelligence, and schools a key point of intervention, but with little internal coordination. This disconnect was exacerbated in some cases by the removal of key service offices, including police stations and social work offices, from the local area; resulting in a weakening of community-level knowledge.

Recommendations

A coordinated police, community and statutory partnership approach to organised crime is required to enable the development of cohesive forms of intervention and responses. A key focus of this work should involve broadening community partnerships to help reduce the risks of involvement in organised crime: notably through partnerships between families, mentors, and schools. A central feature of this should involve investment in preventative community services, particularly in community and campus policing models, as key facilitators and organisers.

Preventing organised crime and mitigating its effects requires good universal service provision, most notably education and youth work. This package of embedded response requires an enduring infrastructure including physical focal points like community spaces, services mitigating social exclusion and poverty, and processes for empowerment and dialogue.

Improved partnership working and information sharing should be prioritised, with organised crime acting as a 'red thread' that connects local service provision. Improving links between community justice and other community based planning solutions could involve integrating locality planning with services such as employability, work with ex-offenders, and services dealing with addiction or mental health. These partnerships should prioritise shared goals that are backed up by genuinely shared organisational objectives and performance indicators to incentivise joined up practice.

A key part of achieving joined-up practice must include developing more effective models of working, between national resources configured to tackle organised crime ( i.e. partner agencies co-located at the Scottish Crime Campus), and more local service providers. Operations by national agencies should not be developed or implemented in isolation from considerations of community plans and impacts.

Summary

This report has presented the findings of the first study of the community experiences of Serious Organised Crime ( SOC) in Scotland, based on a detailed, qualitative case-study approach involving 188 participants. The study has significantly extended the knowledge-base pertaining to organised crime in Scotland, both in terms of understanding community experiences in areas where SOC is embedded, and in communities impacted by more diffuse and mobile forms of SOC.

SOC has deep roots in Scotland and extends its corrosive reach into a wide range of communities, businesses, and institutions. To date, SOC activity has been approached principally as a policing problem. While recognising the pivotal role of policing, the study suggests that tackling the deep roots of SOC effectively requires a broader set of partnerships, involving both statutory agencies and local community groups.

The step-change in working practices suggested by this shift is not straightforward and will require both strong leadership and a willingness to listen. The starting point, however, is the very real and enduring forms of harm, victimisation and indebtedness revealed in this report. Only by shining a light on an issue that is often in the shadows, or is distorted through the glare of media glamourisation and dubious forms of celebrity, can real and effective responses be formulated. This report aims to make a contribution to this important endeavour.