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What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: XX What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: XIX For every lie you tell, you're gonna cry, cry, cry One minute closer to the hour of your doom turn and face the strange a liar loves to lie sail away, sail away, sail away Till your daddy takes the T-bird away What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: X... What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: XVII Tuesday, October 31, 2006
all the way around the world, a kilo is a measure:
On the subject of slinging, Yglesias writes:
Street level dealers, by contrast, are a bona fide nuisance. You wouldn't want those dudes slinging on the corner where you live or right outside the shop where you buy stuff.OK, sort of. It so happens that I've lived in two places where street-level dealing was totally open-air, Wire-style: On Plum Street in New Brunswick, NJ, in 1998-9; and 11th Street NW between Columbia and Harvard in late 2002. Both, at the time, were relatively high violent-crime areas. A lot of cocaine moved on Plum Street, which once resulted in a very strange encounter during my old band Yakub's Saturday basement practice, whereby an addled 40-something calling himself Native Born decided he was going to join the group. On 11th Street in '02, it could be genuinely frightening: this was during the height of the MS-13-inspired Salvadoran gang wars in Columbia Heights, and you could mississippi-count how long it took between hearing shots fired and hearing police sirens. On both blocks, however, not a hair on my head was touched. That's for a very simple reason, one The Wire explains time and again: violence on drug corners is extremely bad for business. No one can sell anything when two crews are beefing. You have to bring in extra muscle, which is expensive. And the extra police presence makes the whole thing a genuine nuisence. The last thing especially any crew wants is to piss off a civilian resident more than absolutely necessary, since those are the people who, pushed too far, will raise hell at neighborhood, precinct and even city council meetings -- which is, again, bad for business. Letting civilians walk on by without harassment, by contrast, is a sound business plan. I'm sure if I were to have polled my neighbors on both blocks, everyone would have prefered the drug trade move to a Hamsterdam-like area. And I've never lived in a hellhole like East Baltimore. Matt is right that it's a nuisance to see four guys sitting on a milk crate 50 feet from your house with closed palms looking for clientele. But what's a nuisance is not always what's dangerous. In Columbia Heights in '02, it was the territory where no dealers worked that got shot up -- no-man's-land is typically more dangerous, appearances aside. Meanwhile, the beefs get decided at higher levels, meaning that it's sounder police work to go after the higher-ups, even if you know that the drug market will replace its old vendors in a flash. Them's the wages of criminalizing drugs: true amelioration defies policing solutions, but as long as drugs are illegal, it makes more sense to lock up the bigger players than the corner kids. --Spencer Ackerman
The other explanation for Plum Street's safety was that it remained thoroughly under control of La Mugre. Monopoly in the drug trade is much better compatible with public order than competition. |
