Crack Dealers and Restrictive Deterrence: Identifying Narcs*

Abstract

Data drawn from semistructured interviews with 40 active street‐level crack dealers are used to illustrate, apply, and expand the concept of restrictive deterrence. The article focuses on the perceptual shorthand dealers use to determine whether buyers in question are “narcs.” In presenting this shorthand, the article seeks to demonstrate how interactions among marketplace democratization (i.e., the idea of selling to as many different customers as possible to maximize profits), marketplace volatility, transactional brevity, and threats from law enforcement affect its complexity and refinement. Respondents operated out of a medium‐sized, midwestern metropolitan area (population: 2.2 million) within a central city of 390,000.

A little information goes a long way: Expertise and identity theft

“…For example, in a grocery store an offender may spend a lot on groceries, but ask for only a small amount of cash back on the transaction to obtain money without drawing attention from a cashier. Such practices of changing the way they enact the frauds are consistent with research on risk reduction and arrest avoidance strategies, which are developed based on experience and expertise (Jacobs, 1993(Jacobs, , 1996.…”

“…Although offenders face many risks, research indicates that experienced offenders develop a set of specialized skills designed to avoid detection from law enforcement (e.g., Holt, Blevins, & Kuhns, 2014;Jacobs, 1999;Jacques & Reynald, 2012;Wright & Decker, 1997). Theoretically, this branch of research is consistent with work on restrictive deterrence and examines the risk reduction and arrest avoidance strategies of offenders (Gallupe, Bouchard, & Caulkins, 2011;Jacobs, 1993Jacobs, , 1996Jacques & Allen, 2014). A key idea from this research is that offenders do not passively accept risk.…”

“…Similarly, experienced drug dealers report using a number of observational skills (e.g., examining a buyer's physical appearance, listening for verbal clues, and testing customers by forcing drug use on the spot) to determine whether a potential buyer is an undercover officer (Jacobs, 1996). For the most part, experienced dealers believe that years of trafficking have given them the ability to distinguish undercover agents from "true dope fiends" (Jacobs, 1996, p. 293).…”

“It takes skills to take a car”: Perceptual and procedural expertise in carjacking

“…Some have continued to focus on burglars (see e.g., Nee & Meenaghan, 2006;Garcia-Retamero & Dhami, 2009;Bernasco & Luykx, 2003); comparing their assessments of defensible space to those of police officers (Ham-Rowbottom, Gifford, & Shaw, 1999), assessing their use of spatial dimensions in target searches (Hakim, Rengert, & Shachmurove, 2001), comparing the proficiency of incarcerated burglars in selecting appropriate targets (Nee & Taylor, 2000), explaining burglars' and other offenders' "deterrability" (Nagin & Pogarsky, 2001;Pogarsky, 2002;Piquero & Pogarsky, 2002), and whether they are able to translate their burglary skills into breaking into cars (Michael, Hull, & Zahm, 2001). Additional work on expertise has moved beyond burglary to examine sexual predation (Ward, 1999), and the ability of offenders to detect law enforcement (Jacobs & Miller, 1998) and snitches (Jacobs, 1996).…”

Offending: Drug-related expertise and decision making

“…That said, drug use has been identified as one of several outcomes in some studies investigating decisions to commit robbery (e.g., while in Clare's (2011) comparison of the perceptual and procedural skills of expert and novice burglars, drug use was found to be highly prevalent within the sample. By comparison, more attention has been paid to the role of decision making in the realm of systemic crime, in particular effective apprehension avoidance techniques (Jacobs, 1996a;, differentiating police officers from drug clients (Jacobs, 1996b), managing retaliation (Jacobs, Topalli, & Wright, 2000), and drug smuggling (Che & Benson, 2014).…”