Opening remarks.

• Author: Worden, Robert E.

Thank you for the invitation to join you here today. I am quite impressed by the program that Jim Peluso and the Albany Law Review has assembled, and I am very pleased to be a part of it.

The invitation to make some opening remarks came with a lot of latitude in the choice of topics, and perhaps I should hasten to give you the good news--I will not in the next twenty minutes recite any statistics about the scope and severity of the drug problem, the prevalence of drug use, the incidence of drug-related violence and predatory crime, and so forth. I will leave that to the other members of the panel. And I may also not even take as many as twenty minutes.

The bad news is that I may be just a bit autobiographical, as I would like to tell you about some research I became involved in about ten years or so ago. I was then on the faculty of Michigan State University, and my research generally tended to dwell--as it does presently--on policing. At about that time, the Narcotics Division of the Detroit Police Department (DPD) became interested in experimenting with intensive, geographically focused street-level enforcement, or "crackdowns." To their credit, they wanted to learn whether such a tactic worked in any respect other than generating arrests. With support from the National Institute of Justice, a colleague and I undertook an evaluation of the process and the outcomes of the Narcotics Division's effort.(1)

While I presume that I would be preaching to the choir here to enumerate the virtues of such experimentation, I should note that it is unfortunately uncommon for drug enforcement initiatives of this and other kinds to be evaluated in such a way. If they are evaluated at all, it is normally by compiling data on arrests, drug seizures, and so forth, and by making what are often fairly optimistic assumptions about the consequences that follow from those enforcement outputs. Impacts on drug use or availability, drug-related crime, or neighborhood conditions are usually not treated as testable, empirical questions.(2)

The DPD's enforcement initiative and our evaluation focused on four areas in Detroit that together encompassed about eleven neighborhoods in all. We collected data on enforcement outputs in those areas: drug raids, arrests, and drug seizures. We observed the enforcement units at work in the field and we formally interviewed almost all of the officers in the Narcotics Division who performed street-level enforcement. We obtained data on reported crime in those areas, of course, and we also surveyed samples of the residents of those areas about their perceptions of their neighborhoods--especially, but not limited to, the use and sale of illicit drugs in the neighborhoods, their fear of crime, and their quality of life more generally.

We also conducted focus-group style interviews with people who were active in neighborhood groups, and who were knowledgeable about the problems in the neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods were not Detroit's worst, by any means, but they had at least moderately serious problems of several kinds. They were home to retail drug markets, and that is why the DPD Narcotics Division wanted to focus on them. At the time, most of those markets were crack markets. Crack arrived in Detroit around 1986 or so, and, in 1990, when the DPD's crackdowns commenced, the markets remained fairly unstable and violent, even though the preponderance of crack sales were made not in open-air markets, as they were in many other cities, but from crack houses. (There was ample vacant and abandoned housing in...