Reframing ‘Place Leadership’: An analysis of Leadership in responding to the wicked issue of county lines and criminality within a context of post pandemic public health policing

Abstract

The chapter explores a practical approach to place leadership within what is increasingly acknowledged as a wicked problem. County lines and drug trafficking take place within complicated landscapes as multi-agency leaders, including police leaders, develop innovative solutions based on dialogue and relational approaches to this crucial wicked issue. Recent evidence on the scale of vulnerable individuals and groups inhabiting so called ‘left behind’ places provides testament to this 21st Century social policy problem (Addidle and Liddle, 2020). The many competing and contradictory conceptualisations of the phenomena of vulnerability leave place leaders with dilemmas on how to prioritise, operationalise and respond to such placed-based problems (Addidle and Liddle, 2020). Extant literature on place leadership remains largely at the economic level of analysis and based on growth models, but public leadership literature is more extensive and recent work has added to our understanding of the social contexts of place leadership within the public realm. Our key aim in this chapter is to add theoretical, empirical and policy insights to existing understandings, with a specific focus on crime and county lines.