Drugs & Crime Research & Evaluation

The proposed research will examine what law enforcement practices have been effective at reducing drug use at the local level. Specifically, the applicant proposes to (1) assemble a time-series of price/purity indicators that reflect the success of source area and international interdiction efforts at reducing the supply of drugs to the United States; (2) assemble a time-series of law enforcement anti-drug programs and practices using data from a sample of police agencies across the United States; (3) use data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program to develop measures of drug markets and drug use in the same counties that provide the police data; and (4) determine how law enforcement activities affected drug markets controlling for the temporal effectiveness of source area and international interdiction. To accomplish these objectives the applicant will construct an integrated data file from a variety of sources (i.e. ADAM, STRIDE, and UCR).
Identifying specific police programs, initiatives, and major events to construct #2 above will involve a historical reconstruction from the sampled police agencies using annual reports, newspaper accounts, and U.S. Sentencing Commission data. Once a depiction of the sampled departments is created, a verification check will be conducted with key informants from the respective police departments. Findings will be presented at the NIJ Annual Research and Evaluation Conference, in addition to a full technical report and a practitioner guide for self-evaluation. The goals of the project are two-fold: (1) to take a historical look at what practices were effective at disrupting local domestic drug markets, and (2) developing an evaluation methodology that could be applied for the evaluation of future law enforcement practices.