CRIMINAL GROUP EMBEDDEDNESS AND THE ADVERSE EFFECTS OF ARRESTING A GANG'S LEADER: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY

• Date: 01 May 2014
• Author: ROBERT VARGAS
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12033

CRIMINAL GROUP EMBEDDEDNESS AND THE

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF ARRESTING A GANG’S

LEADER: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY∗

ROBERT VARGAS1, 2

1Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin—Madison

2Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research,

Harvard University

KEYWORDS: gang leaders, neighborhoods, violent crime

Although law enforcement agencies arrest criminal group leaders to dismantle or-

ganized crime, few studies have assessed whether such interventions produce adverse

effects. Through a mixed-method comparative case study of the Latin Kings and 22

Boys street gangs in Chicago, this article examines the consequences of arresting a

gang’s leader. Using violent crime data, I show that a spike in violent crime took place

in the first month after the arrest of the 22 Boys gang leader. In contrast, the arrest

of the Latin Kings gang leader produced no change in violent crime. Using several

qualitative data sources, I show that the arrest of the 22 Boys gang leader temporarily

led to the gang’s withdrawal from its territory, which spurred violent aggression from

rival gangs in adjacent territories. In contrast, the Latin Kings gang continued its oper-

ations because the gang’s prison leaders quickly appointed new leadership. The results

suggest that criminal group embeddedness (or the social relations between criminal

groups) can contribute to adverse effects in interventions targeting gang or other crim-

inal group leaders.

What happens after law enforcement personnel arrest the leader of a criminal group?

Although arresting a criminal group’s leader has been used in a variety of crime suppres-

sion efforts, we know remarkably little about the adverse effects of such interventions.

Scholars have identified various forms of adverse effects stemming from law enforcement

interventions (McCord, 2003; Reppetto, 1976), but much remains to be understood be-

cause, as Sherman et al. (1997) noted, researchers often fail to assess the adverse effects

or fail to report them in their results. Given the dearth of research on both interven-

tions targeting criminal group leaders and adverse effects, this article fills a significant gap

through a case study evaluating the consequences of arresting the highest ranking leaders

of two street gangs in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. Specifically, the article

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2011.52.issue-2/issuetoc.

This research was supported by the Institute for Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Educa-

tion, through Grant R305B080027 to Northwestern University, and by the National Science Foun-

dation (NSF 1030978). The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the

views of the Institute, U.S. Department of Education, or the National Science Foundation. This ar-

ticle was greatly improved by feedback and suggestions from Jeremy Freese, Christine Percheski,

Andrew Papachristos, Dan Gillion, and Wes Skogan. Direct correspondence to Robert Vargas,

1730 Cambridge Street, S406, Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: rvargas@rwj.harvard.edu).

C2014 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12033

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 52 Number 2 143–168 2014 143

144 VARGAS

introduces the concept of criminal group embeddedness, which is defined as a criminal

group’s immersion in social relations with other criminal groups over time and space, as

a potential source of adverse effects in law enforcement interventions targeting criminal

groups. This case study shows that interventions targeting criminal group leaders may af-

fect not only the targeted group but also the targeted group’s allies and competitors. In

doing so, this article makes two important contributions.

First, although scholars have identified several ways in which law enforcement inter-

ventions can produce adverse effects, such as through the spatial displacement of crime

(Hunt and Weiner, 1977; Spergel, 2007) or increasing the cohesiveness of criminal groups

(Klein, 2011; Wilson and Chermak, 2011), this article introduces criminal group embed-

dedness as an additional source of adverse effects. Whether law enforcement agencies are

targeting mafia groups, terrorist cells, or street gangs, such criminal groups can be embed-

ded in collaborative or competitive relations with other criminal groups. For example, an

intervention aimed at dismantling a drug cartel could have unintended adverse effects by,

for example, sparking violent competition among rival drug cartels over the market share

of the cartel dismantled by law enforcement. This article argues that evaluations of law

enforcement interventions targeting criminal group leaders should consider studying the

actions of criminal groups with whom the targeted group has had collaborative or com-

petitive relations. Doing so would help scholars develop a more complete understanding

of the consequences of law enforcement operations against criminal groups.

Second, although a large body of research has evaluated the effectiveness of various

types of gang interventions from increased policing (Weiss and McGarrell, 1999), height-

ened enforcement of curfew laws (Fritsch, Caeti, and Taylor, 1999), and gang-intervention

programs (Braga et al., 2001; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Skogan et al., 2008; Spergel, 1995),

only a handful of studies has examined the consequences of arresting a street gang’s leader

(Knox, 2000; Papachristos, 2001; Venkatesh, 2006). These ethnographies, however, do

not provide a systematic quantitative evaluation of violent crime trends before and after

the gang leader’s arrest. By combining a time series analysis of violent crime data with

rich ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates how the arrest of a gang leader

can have the adverse effect of increasing gang violence by igniting violent competition

among gangs. In Little Village, three street gangs—the 22 Boys, Latin Kings, and Satan

Disciples—maintained orderly relations with one another by occupying their sidewalks

and street corners to signify the occupation of their respective territories. After the arrest

of their gang leader, however, the 22 Boys gang stopped occupying spaces in its territory,

and rival gangs began violently competing with one another as they encroached and at-

tempted to acquire the territory of the 22 Boys gang. This finding contributes to research

on gang interventions by showing that interventions targeting a specific gang also might

have unintended consequences for the targeted gang’s allies, competitors, or both.

To begin, I briefly review the literature on the adverse effects of law enforcement in-

terventions, as well as the literature on gang interventions. Next, I discuss the concept of

criminal group embeddedness and then describe the details of the case study, methods,

and results.

GANG INTERVENTIONS AND ADVERSE EFFECTS

As McCord (2003) noted, identifying adverse effects of gang interventions, as well as

crime interventions more generally, is an important and understudied research area in