Dr Matthew Bacon  – Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Sheffield

This blog is not an obituary or lament to the drug squad, for they are not dead and buried within the history of policing but still very much alive and kicking their way through the doors of suspected drug offenders in this country and further afield. The point I want to make with this somewhat overly dramatic title is that drug squads are an endangered species with an uncertain future.

In a crude nutshell, drug squads are specialist detective units licensed to police drug markets and drug-related criminality. They have been a key element of drug law enforcement since around the 1960s, when widespread moral panic about the taking of drugs by young people prompted a dedicated and specialised police response to the novel and increasingly notorious ‘drug problem’. As half of the first full-time two-man drug squad in the north-east of England, Malcolm Young has subsequently written that he was ‘tasked with defining and dealing with the new social aberration of “flower power”, “the counter culture”, and the “psychedelic trip”’.  Up until this point in the history of drug control, drugs had been policed in a relatively routine and haphazard manner, as and when police officers stumbled across or were called upon to do something about suspected drug offenders in their area. As drug problems worsened in the 1980s, an era when ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric was reverberating on both sides of the Atlantic, the enforcement approach came to dominate drug control policy. The Thatcher government came down hard on the people responsible for international trafficking and domestic supply, pumped exorbitant amounts of money into the campaign, and gave the police more powers. Although they differed significantly in terms of their organisation and operations, by the late 1980s, all of the police forces in England and Wales had drugs squads in place.

Over the past decade or so, however, there has been a substantial decline in the number of drug squads operating at both force and district level. To further investigate this largely unreported sea change in drug policy, I set out to examine the culture and daily activities of plain clothes drug detectives working in two contrasting constabularies: one metropolitan area in the south, which I call ‘Metropolis’, and a small town in the north, ‘Smallville’.

Before fieldwork commenced in Metropolis, I learned that the drug squad had become the firearms squad a few years earlier, and while the detectives employed therein remained the primary drug law enforcers of the district, their focus was now on firearms offences. Towards the end of the fieldwork period their focus changed to gang-related criminal activity and the firearms squad was rechristened the gang squad. As for the situation in Smallville, plans were put into motion to disband the drug squad as the research project was coming to a close, with the intention of merging the separate squads of the proactive investigation department into a generalist crime squad.

The Smallville detectives did not react terribly well to the pending demise of the drug squad. It provoked them into questioning the motivations and competencies of their supervisors and chief officers. Signs of anger and frustration were regularly displayed as they told me about how management ‘didn’t have a clue’ and would ‘end up regretting their decision’. The detectives were convinced that drug dealers would take advantage of their newfound freedom and in turn there would be more drugs on the streets and more drug-related crime. They truly believed in the importance of their work, so not only did the decision to disband the squad deprive them of their territory, it also challenged their sense of mission and made them feel devalued and dejected. From their perspective, the police service no longer considered the control of drug supply to be a priority and this was a huge mistake. The Metropolis detectives said they remembered reacting similarly when the drug squad became the firearms squad, but they soon accepted the decision and the need to concentrate on dealing with the most harmful criminal elements of the drug trade, seeing as ‘it is impossible to deal with them all’.

This downgrading of drug policing can probably be attributed to a combination of three factors: resources, results and realisation.