Gangs recruiting skilled drone pilots to smuggle drugs, ketchup and shower gel into prisons, police warn

Gangs are recruiting skilled drone pilots to fly everything from drugs, phones and even sachets of ketchup and mustard to prisoners’ cell windows in Amazon-style deliveries, police have warned.

With increasingly sophisticated drones now capable of flying “huge payloads” of up to 7kg in highly pinpointed deliveries, organised crime groups are headhunting people from the non-criminal world to smuggle a vast and at times mundane range of items such as shower gel into jails, detectives said.

As well as fuelling growing violence inside prisons, as prisoners accrue debts over illicit items that have been smuggled in and purchased at a cost inflated far above their street or retail value, police warned that inmates using phones to orchestrate criminality in the outside world also posed a “huge threat”.

Speaking outside HMP Forest Bank, Detective Superintendent Andy Buckthorpe of Greater Manchester Police said it was a “constant battle” to keep up with new smuggling techniques, with drone technology constantly becoming more sophisticated and accessible.

“Drone technology is getting bigger and better so the payloads are getting bigger. Drones now are able to fly straight to the window of the cell,” he was reported as saying by multiple outlets.

DCI Chris McClellan said: “What you’re seeing is organised crime groups who will identify people who have the skill sets to fly a drone and pay them an amount to do that.

“Some of the people we’ve arrested for flying the drones aren’t necessarily all criminals – they’ve just been hired to do that because they know how to operate drones. It takes a certain skill set to fly these drones. If you show yourself as being proficient in that, there’s demand for that individual.”

Mr Buckthorpe added: “There is a network around the country. These people aren’t just involved in drone incursions in prisons in Greater Manchester – they are connected to other prisons around the country.”

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The comments came as the force took part in a day of action at prisons in Greater Manchester as part of an operation to tackle crime behind bars, which saw traffic cops armed with licence plate-recognition cameras, sniffer dogs and a police drone stationed outside jails.

Assistant Chief Constable John Webster told the Manchester Evening News that families were exploiting children as young as 14 to smuggle illict items, in a situation he labelled “diabolical”.

Illustrating the potential value of such efforts to smugglers, one officer told reporters that a £50 bag of cannabis would sell for hundreds of pounds in prison, adding: “People get slashed all the time for it.”

In addition to Forest Bank, Greater Manchester has three other prisons – HMP Buckley Hall, HMP Hindley, and HMP Manchester, also known as Strangeways, which was put in emergency measures earlier this month.

Issuing an urgent notification over “catastrophic” conditions at Strangeways, inspectors said nearly four in 10 inmates had tested positive for drugs, and that it was taking far too long for the prison service to install more secure cell windows and replace damaged netting to deter the “frequent arrival” of drones.