Form a squad!

Labour security minister Dan Jarvis is forming a squad.

The dogs on the street know dodgy ‘Turkish’ barbers, vape shops and American candy stores are often fronts for organised crime. From county lines drug networks to human trafficking, criminals use these predominantly cash-only businesses to launder their profits. As such, rogue retailers are the heart and lungs of organised crime, a juicy strategic target for law enforcement.

Once upon a time, gangsters were forced to use specialist money-launderers and dodgy accountants. Now, they simply rent a parade of shops and populate it with pretend-businesses. Lax asylum and immigration policies guarantees a never-ending supply employees. Police and local authorities, skint and fixated on performance regimes prioritizing low-hanging fruit, appear impotent.

Vape shops aside, this is a story as old as time: a criminal problem flourishing due to underfunded police, regulatory chaos, inter-agency confusion and - most importantly - cack-handed government policy. You won’t be surprised to hear, then, the latest wheeze to crack down on retail banditry involves another old chestnut. One dreamt up by civil servants, senior officers seconded to the Home Office and spotty-faced spads. One designed to fill a space in the weekly comms grid. One designed to fool Joe Public into thinking someone, somewhere, is doing something...

Form a squad!

The Squad.

This week, it’s security minister Dan Jarvis’s turn to form a squad. Dan’s announced (h/t The Daily Telegraph):

Gangs running high street vape stores, barbers’ shops and mini-marts are to be targeted by a new specialist law enforcement unit.

The new National Crime Agency cell, backed with £20m, will be tasked with cracking down on gangs operating high street businesses as fronts for organised crime.

A new National Crime Agency cell! Backed with a whole £20m! Many will, understandably, read the headline and move on. They’ll think, yes, someone’s doing something because there are seven bloody Turkish barbers in their small market town.

Let’s unpack this, shall we? Of course, the plan’s largely smoke and mirrors. This crack squad of barber-busters is comprised of…

75 new police officers… recruited across the country to tackle high street gangs.

75 cops? For the whole of the UK? I actually spat tea through my nose reading that. Most coppers who’ve ever suffered an HQ posting will have seen this movie before. Such squads are designed to give the impression of dynamism. In reality, they’re a vehicle for ambitious middle-ranking coppers to temporarily escape their dreary provincial forces. For PowerPoint presentation and death-by-Excel spreadsheet. For statistical gerrymandering on an epic scale. No wonder civil servants love this shit. And, remember, the National Crime Agency’s stuffed with civil servants cosplaying Eliot Ness.

Anyway, here’s a bluffer’s guide to squads:

The squad isn’t a gang-busting team of gnarly crime-fighters. No, it’s an intelligence unit, which means civilian analysts and HQ coppers (I’ve been one). These people are adept at what they do, but they seldom kick down doors and arrest bad guys. No, there are other people for that - ordinary coppers. We’ll talk about them later. Nonetheless, going on telly and saying you’re setting up a gang-busting super unit is great comms, right?

Your squad intelligence unit needs stats. Stats drive business and performance indicators. Where do you get your stats from? Yes, ordinary coppers in force intelligence units. Badger them for all of their hard-won intelligence reporting, strategy documents and other bumpf. You’ll recycle it, put your name on the bottom then tell the ordinary coppers what they should be doing. When I worked in counter-terrorism, this was MI5’s playbook. When I worked in organised crime, it was the NCA’s too. Entire careers have been made in this manner, a sort of police pyramid-selling scheme for spooks and senior coppers.

Now you have a team. You have shiny, plagiarized reassessed data. You’ve a new office, business cards and a logo. Now you must coordinate. This means, of course, telling local police oiks to solve your problem for you. It will involve bullying, passive-aggressive meetings with local forces and cultivating middle-ranking officers into playing ball. After all, don’t they want a slice of the action too? Maybe for their next posting?

This is VERY IMPORTANT. There are many, many stakeholders involved in whatever problem it is you were established to solve. The days of long boozy lunches might be over, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t conferences-with-buffets or networking events to be exploited. Then, of course, there’s aviation fuel to be burned: the scourge of high-street retail crime involves criminals from all sorts of windswept and interesting places. It STANDS TO REASON superintendent so-and-so needs to visit the Armenian ministry of justice. Twice. Then there’s the FBI conference at Quantico. Could you write me a report to explain how we did it, Dc Adler?

Liaison.

This is also VERY IMPORTANT - possibly as important as your fortnight at the Yerevan Marriott on liaison duties (Jesus, the Lahmajun was good). You must arrange a raid and televise it. Get a pliable force to do all of the grunt work, but send a few people wearing liveried Yank-style ‘raid jackets’ to supervise and offer, er, real-time intelligence support. Invite a minister and a chief constable too. They absolutely love this stuff, especially if the minister gets to wear a stab vest. In Form a Squad World© this is one of the single most important things you will ever do. You’ll be telling war stories about how you watched the whole thing, via Teams, for years.

“Mate, I’ve got more warranted powers than you. Where will I be? Er, I’ll wait outside.”

Your supreme leadership of The Squad, of course, facilitated much success. You know this because your Rainman-like performance analyst wrote a report ‘proving’ your mastery of playing whack-a-mole with Kurdish vape emporiums. Then, write hero-grams and commendations for your team, strategically designed to reward those who (1) are key allies in your Game of Thrones-style career politicking (2) the DI from Ruralshire police you had a fling with in Yerevan and (3) any DEI-worthy staff you can patronize in order to burnish your woke credentials.

All good things must come to an end, including your squad. Maybe it will become a permanent unit, but you’re a shark right? If you stay still, you’ll die. Besides, everyone will remember it was your baby - it says so on your application form for the senior command course. Then there’ll be another squad to sort out another problem. You’ll make sure Rainman’s on the team, along with the DI from Ruralshire. Oh, she’s a DCI now?

Life moves on, and so do you.

When you went for a scoping meeting with a provincial force, a DI nearing retirement suggested there was an easier workaround to the problem of high street money-laundering. In fact, he suggested, you didn’t really need a squad at all. He was talking nonsense of course, so you completely ignored him.

The DI suggested three things, all of which were pie-in-the-sky fantasies and probably explained why he was retiring as a DI. They were:

If each local command unit had its own team of financial investigators, they’d be able to identify and target rogue businesses. They’d meet the local trading standards people once a week and collaborate. Delivered locally, disrupting NIM level 1, 2 and potentially level 3 crime would be significantly easier.

This isn’t very glamorous either. Local authority trading standards officers do a perfectly good job, but they’re grotesquely underfunded and poorly supported. These guys, in a sensible world, would be the eyes and ears of the aforementioned financial investigators. As it is, the poor bastards are occasionally threatened by gangs in a manner familiar to Sicilian anti-mafia magistrates.

Much of this problem is due to Foreign National Offenders. QED.

Remember though, this stuff would cost significantly more than the puny £20 million the Government are spending on your squad.

And so, my friends, the wheel turns. Join a squad! It’s the way forward. And don’t forget your Marriott card.

Until next time, toodle pip!