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13 Current Issues Crim. Just. 5 (2001-2002)
The Cost of Crackdowns: Policing Cabramatta's Heroin Market

handle is hein.journals/cicj13 and id is 9 raw text is: The Cost of Crackdowns: Policing Cabramatta's Heroin Market LISA MAHER* & DAVID DIXON** Introduction At a time of increasing enthusiasm for proactive crime control, this paper draws on extended research in Cabramatta, Sydney's principal street-level heroin market, to caution that crackdowns on such markets may have counterproductive effects.' These include serious risks to public health, threats to community safety as a result of geographical, social and substance displacement, and harm to police-community relations and thereby to police efficiency. The beneficial effects - such as potentially improving the quality of life in local areas and reducing some recorded crime rates - must be weighed against these costs. There may be goals no less important than reducing crime, and disorder comes in more than one form. Previous evaluations of police crackdowns have concentrated on their effect on crime, particularly violent crime (cf Sherman 1990, 1997). Displacement has been narrowly conceived. Discussion of police-public relations has focused on civil liberties. In each respect, we argue that the effects of crackdowns require more complex analysis. Furthermore, the impacts of drug market crackdowns on public health deserve central consideration. Much needs to be done in order to translate fine policy commitments to harm minimization into operational policing practice. In this article, we suggest that the current deployment of law enforcement is inappropriate because it threatens to increase, rather than reduce the risks and harms associated with illegal drug markets. We consider harms to public health, to community safety, and to police-community relations. Data are drawn from in-depth ethnographic study of Cabramatta's drug market which has been underway since 1995. Sources include tape-recorded, in-depth interviews with drug market participants, more than 2000 pages of fieldnotes, and structured questionnaires. During the early period of the study (1995-97), Cabramatta was the subject of several high profile, intensive, and sustained policing interventions which targeted heroin users and user-dealers.2 In this period, the principal police tactic was undercover buy/bust operations. * PhD, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, L.Maher@unsw.edu.au. ** PhD, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, D.Dixon@unsw.edu.au. I This research was supported by grants from the Commonwealth Department of Health and Family Services (National Drug Crime Prevention Fund) and the US National Institutes of Health (AIDS-FlRCA Grant # R03 TW00562-01). We are grateful to CICJ's anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 2 There is no neat distinction between users and dealers at street level: most dealers use, and indeed sell in order to finance their own consumption. They bear little resemblance to the folk-devil image of the drug- dealer.

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