“You're Always Training the Dog”: 1 Strategic Interventions to Reconfigure Drug Markets

Abstract

Based on ethnographic observation of the changes in drug markets and violence in New York City over the past 20 years, this paper compares and contrasts three distinct types of drug markets and the types of systemic violence that are characteristic of each and argues that knowing which kinds of markets and contexts are associated with what kinds of violence can be valuable for policy makers and professionals. Further, evolving drug markets and different forms of violence associated with particular market types are, in part, responses to law enforcement interventions intended to eliminate drug markets. Police interventions alter the character of drug markets—either for better or for worse—as they adapt, and these interventions can produce markedly different outcomes with regard to violence and crime. Comparatively brief interventions of limited scope can effectively control violence and reconfigure markets by “training” them to act in ways less likely to produce violence and social disorder.