Tackling Druglords in an Incipient Market: Police Raids & Drug Crime in Uruguay

• In Event: Drugs, Crime and Territory in Latin America

Abstract

This paper contributes to the empirical literature regarding the relationship between drug markets' competition and the levels of crime and violence. Illegal drug trafficking, as it has been repeatedly suggested in the literature, plays an important role in the generation of crimes, especially violent crimes with firearms (Goldstein et al., 1997; Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000; Ousey and Lee, 2004). We take advantage of a case study where drug-related crimes have dramatically increased in the last decade from extreme low levels in part as a consequence of the growth of the regional drug-dealing market. We analyze the effects of police raids in the most conflictive neighborhoods of Montevideo. These changes in the drug market, which led to the increase in disputes between gangs to control the market, led government to resort to various policies to try to counteract not only homicides, but also the growing trends in robbery and thefts. One of these security policies is the operational or saturation operations. These public interventions tend to have an impact on the relationship of competition between gangs in the drug market and crime levels in the neighborhoods where these gangs belong. Such operations, on the other hand, may have counterproductive results despite achieving symbolic objectives.
Given the limited external validity of studies carried out mostly in developed countries, extrapolating those studies' conclusions to Uruguay may not be accurate. Our objective is to learn the short and long term effects of raid and saturation operations for different types of crime. We aim to evaluate how the raids affect gang activity and drug markets by analyzing the effects of raids in a neighborhood relative to similar neighborhoods. We estimate a difference-in-differences model (Keele, Malhotra and McCubbins 2013). To do this, we use the synthetic control case method (Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller 2010). This synthetic control model is better because it reports the effect of a search for a neighborhood relative to other neighborhoods. In this way, we can isolate the effect of a raid for a specific neighborhood relative to what would have happened if the raid had never happened in the neighborhood.
The rationale for this is that the impact of police raids on crime levels can be a good indicator of the level of competition for the inter-gang drug market. If an increase in the levels of violence and delinquency is observed where the operation was carried out compared to neighborhoods with similar characteristics in the months after the operation, this could be explained by an increase in the competitiveness between gangs for the control of the drug market. Contrarily, if the raids manage to reduce levels of violence and delinquency in the neighborhood, it could be associated with a lower level of competition in the drug market and kind of a market empowerment by some of the trafficking gangs. Finally, we pay attention not only to the evolution of the general levels of crime, but also to the type of crimes that predominate after the police raid was carried out.

Authors

• Juan Ariel Bogliaccini, Universidad Católica del Uruguay

• James Edward Monogan, University of Georgia

• Juan Ignacio Pereira