Social Value
From Manchester to Maidstone, Cornwall to Cambridge, no city, town or village in the UK is immune to the scourge of County Lines.
Fuelled by organised crime, these cross-regional drug dealing networks leave a trail of exploited vulnerable adults and children in their wake, import violence into previously peaceful areas and devastate communities up and down the country.
Combatting County Lines is not only a ministerial priority, it’s also a matter of public safety. Everyone has a stake in safeguarding public health, reducing crime, and protecting vulnerable people in our communities.
And that’s exactly where the UK’s 15,000-strong network of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras comes in. Since 2015, BAE Systems has been supporting the National ANPR Service (NAS) programme, whereby number plates are instantly cross-referenced against a database of vehicles of interest, with complex searches returned in minutes, not hours.
More recently, as delivery partner for Home Office Innovation Law Enforcement, we have worked with six Police Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) to enhance and develop ANPR capabilities to combat County Lines criminality.
In this role, we worked with law enforcement partners across six UK regions to design, deploy and iterate a series of pilots which have led to over 100 arrests, £3.3 million of Class A drug seizures, and improved data driven identification of Organised Crime Groups. Home Office economists quantified that £1.4 million in monetary benefits were achieved across the first three pilot sites – a figure which will grow as analysis continues across the other three ROCUs.
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