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These street drug networks are pretty sophisticated and hard to crack down on. For example a typical street operation like openly selling baggies outside of a
by hackermailman 7y ago
These street drug networks are pretty sophisticated and hard to crack down on.
For example a typical street operation like openly selling baggies outside of a legalized injection clinic or to a homeless camp is often done by the addicts themselves, who will always only be holding just enough so they don't see much jail time if they are arrested. Security of this street dealing is overseen by very obvious looking prison gang members who hold no evidence and make sure to never take the money from the street addict peddling their baggies of heroin or crack instead there are drops coordinated with the huge prison goon nearby to prevent any robberies. Resupply is done through complicated handoffs and drops with a network of a few dozen addicts who've been recruited to sell for the gang. The gang themselves are buying off other mid level gangs who in turn are buying from higher level/cartels.
You can try to put a cop on every corner and disrupt the handoffs, or harass these enforcers off the street, but soon your police force is going to run out of overtime money, not to mention the other factor which is gang violence "management". The police know if they decimate the current street gang controlling the street trade that a dozen other gangs will immediately start fighting to be the successor meaning there will be high profile shootings going on in the media, which in turn puts pressure on city hall, which in turn puts pressure on the police chief to do something to stop the violence which eventually means relaxing enforcement on whatever gang currently controls the homeless drug trade so long as they stay in their lane and don't escalate their street violence into the media or against people not involved in the trade. It would be nice to arrest and stop the midlevel and high level suppliers but nobody has figured out how to effectively do that with limited enforcement resources either.
- oh_sigh 7y agoIf the low level gangs knew that cops would remain present on those corners, would the shooting wars erupt when there was a power vacuum? Looking at these gangs as rational economic players, it makes sense to fight over a limited, highly valuable resource(the street corner). It doesn't make sense to fight over it if it's value is extremely reduced(because cops will be stationed there all the time).
- hackermailman 7y agoThe gangs attack each other's higher level members outside the area, meaning broad daylight shootings at some high end restaurant or Starbucks parking lot. There is already a heavy police presence outside the numerous injection sites here all day long it doesn't seem to matter at all in restricting the organized sale of fentanyl. I think you would need to quadruple the budget of the police department to try any real sustained crackdown, and you would have to build new prisons as the current ones are already to capacity. Nobody will vote for the city mayor who wants to significantly jack up property taxes to pay for a new drug crackdown when every voter knows it's largely a tried and failed, unsustainable policy. It would be vastly cheaper to just pour money into gang recruitment discouragement, and hand out free heroin undercutting the gang's product which is what they've started to do here.
- leetcrew 7y agoto some extent, it's a prisoner's dilemma. if all the different gangs can agree not to kill each other for territory, everyone involved is better off on average. but in the short term there's still a huge incentive to be the first gang to defect and take a bunch of territory. from the perspective of an individual actor, it can be rational to do something that decreases the size of the overall pie if you can take a large enough fraction for yourself.
- jseliger 7y agoThis is quite close to the plot of the The Wire. It's amazing that, 20 years later, we're still having the exact same discussions. Although I suppose that David Simon knew that, when he was working on The Wire, he was in some ways reproducing the same structures that have been in place since the "War on Drugs" and the '70s.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]