DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES OF THE STREET-LEVEL DRUG TRADE

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the short-term battle being conducted by street-level drug suppression units in two cities, Minneapolis (MN) and Kansas City (MO). It details features of point-of-sale drug markets that have not been widely explored in the research literature to date, and illuminates an aspect of the crack trade not yet widely discussed: the resilience and adaptability of drug dealers to street-level interdiction tactics.

Data were gathered in two separate phases of participant observation. The Minneapolis operations were observed over a three-year period, while the author was serving as on-site Director for the Crime Control Institute (CCI) during the RECAP and Hot Spots of Crime experiments. A specialty unit charged with problem-solving at addresses which produced the most calls for police service, RECAP dealt with every one of the drug markets described below. Drug markets figured prominently among the Hot Spots of Crime.

Kansas City data were gathered through a week of participant observation and open-ended interviews with officers of the Kansas City Police Department's Street Narcotics Unit (SNU) in the summer of 1990, as pan of the DRAGNET project conducted by CCI and the KCPD. The names for the typologies (Club, Speakeasy, and the supplemental strategies) were coined for the DRAGNET report, and are terms of my invention. The terms “snitch,” “unwitting” “UC,” “buy-bust,” and “reverse sting” are all current in the working police vocabularies.