How Victimized Drug Traders Mobilize Police

The Present Study

Our data come from interviews with twenty-five unincarcerated drug dealers. At the time of the interview, all of them were selling drugs or had done so within the past two years. The sample consists mostly of retail dealers (e.g., persons selling a few grams at a time), with some low-level suppliers also being interviewed (e.g., persons selling a few ounces, kilos, or pounds at a time).

All of the respondents are black. Six of the twenty-five are women. None of the respondents graduated from college; thirteen graduated from high school and another three received their General Educational Development (GED) degree. The age of the population clustered mostly around thirty years, with a few participants being younger. Involvement with police and government prosecutors is the norm for this group; practically all of them have been arrested in the past. Most of them sell crack cocaine, heroin, marijuana, or ecstasy, although some participants sell other drugs too.

The respondents reside and ply their trade in lower-class neighborhoods in St. Louis, Missouri. As of 2010, the city of St. Louis had a population of about 320,000, and that population is predominantly black (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). St. Louis was ranked as the United States’ most dangerous city around the time of our study (Morgan and Morgan 2007; but see Rosenfeld and Lauritsen 2008). The neighborhoods from which our participants were recruited, which are clustered in the northern part of the city, not only are extremely poor but have many related social problems, including high rates of unemployment, low rates of educational attainment, large numbers of single-parent households, and widespread substance abuse. Drugs are sold openly, often by youths in their mid- to late teens, and they have no shortage of customers. Physically, these areas might reasonably be likened to a war zone—a landscape littered with abandoned buildings, junked cars, and gang graffiti sprayed on practically every available wall. Groups of young men with too much time on their hands congregate on the street corner, insulting one another’s sexual prowess, getting high, and looking for any opportunity to make fast cash. As the historian David Courtwright (1998) has observed, this is a world tailor-made for conflict and violence.

We conducted interviews during the summer of 2006. ³ A specially trained project fieldworker, who has cooperated with us in prior studies of active offenders, recruited participants for us. Trading on his trust, he worked through chains of street referrals to gain introductions to drug dealers, and then built on these initial introductions by obtaining further referrals from the dealers themselves. The fieldworker was paid seventy-five dollars per successful recruit because the process of convincing active offenders to participate in research and coordinating their involvement is both time consuming and challenging work. Upon finding a dealer interested in participating, he would contact us to set up a time to meet the seller. In the interest of protecting confidentiality, the meeting place was always a private office at the researchers’ university. The fieldworker would escort the potential participant to that place at the prearranged time. That person would then meet alone with the lead author. Together they would go over an informed consent protocol to ensure the potential participant understood what the project was about, what was required of them, what they would receive in return, and their rights as a research subject. Included in “the deal” was a remuneration payment of fifty dollars. To avoid coercion, we remunerated each participant before the interview began. The rationale for these monetary payments was to enhance cooperation, not to mention that it is a cardinal rule of street life that you should never do anything for nothing (see Jacobs 1999). As travel to and from the university could take our respondents up to thirty minutes each way and interviews lasted about an hour, this payment equates to roughly twenty-five dollars per hour of time devoted to the project.

As already noted, the interviews typically lasted about an hour. The reason for this length is that—based on our previous research—we believe this is about as long as most street offenders are willing or able to sit still and thoughtfully answer questions without becoming annoyed or mentally exhausted. Our questions were theoretically driven and guided by a semi-structured, open-ended interview protocol. The contours of individual interviews varied, but each ultimately addressed the preidentified focal topics of the project. Interviews centered on stories and narratives, as compared to general descriptions.

We asked participants questions about the kind of victimizations they experienced in the course of selling drugs and how they responded to them. For example, “Has someone taken what’s yours by using violence against you? By stealing it when you weren’t around? By not giving you what was owed?” If yes, we would then ask them to provide a description of the most recent or serious events, including why they think those incidents unfolded as they did. Then, we would ask how they responded to each of the victimizations mentioned: “Did you”, for instance, “retaliate with violence? Stop doing business with the perpetrator? Negotiate with that person for a compromise? Do nothing at all? Call the cops?” Again, we would follow up on the response by seeking details regarding how events unfolded as they did.

As with any study based on interviews, ours raises concerns about internal validity, such as the possibility that some participants may have resorted to lying or distortion, or lacked sufficient memory of the incidents asked about during interviews. In order to minimize participants’ concerns, they were promised confidentially, with only the researchers knowing their true identities. Comments initially deemed unusual or unfounded were probed to reveal and, if possible, resolve inconsistencies. As some interviewees may be unwilling to talk truthfully about anything that would portray them in a negative light, we took two steps at the beginning and throughout each interview to safeguard against this possibility: we asked participants to say they did not want to talk about something, rather than lie about it; further, we reaffirmed our promise of confidentiality. Despite the steps taken to maintain internal validity, it is possible some of the participants lied or embellished their accounts.

Existing theory leads us to believe our social distance—meaning our degree of intimacy and cultural similarity (Black 1976, 1998)—from our recruiter and respondents may have shaped our research method and findings (see Jacques and Wright 2008b). Our relational distance from persons cooperating with the study is neither maximal nor minimal because, on one hand, we are strangers to most of the respondents but, on the other hand, they are close associates of the recruiter whom we have known for years (for details, see Jacques and Wright 2008b). Because previous research suggests that closer intimacy between researchers, recruiters, and respondents produces more truthful information (see, e.g., Weinreb 2006), we suspect our data is largely but not entirely valid; as our recruiter once told us:

Nobody is going to tell you everything they do. Or what they did. They’ll let you know most of it. Like shit though, you can’t ever expect them to tell you the whole truth. . . . They’ll tell you some shit and some of it might be mixed up or something. They ain’t gonna tell you exactly how it happened but they’ll tell you. That’s how it is.

Our cultural distance from the participants is rather large, as we share a “white” and a “middle-class” belief system that is in many ways dissimilar to the urban street culture of our recruiter and participants (Anderson 1999, 2011). Although in some respects that is an overgeneralization, we know from talking with our participants that our own common sense often clashes with theirs (Geertz 1983). Such cultural dissimilarities are a double-edge sword when it comes to the ethnographic method, as they facilitate insights but also missed opportunities and misunderstandings (Duneier 2011). For example, something that is important to our participants may wholly escape our attention at questioning or during data analysis.

A study of active or recently active drug sellers “in the wild” inevitably raises important ethical issues. Based on guidance from our university’s Institutional Review Board (which approved this study) and our past experience in interviewing hundreds of active criminals, we instituted a number of measures to protect participants’ confidentiality and otherwise minimize risks associated with the project. These include standard safeguards such as the use of number identifiers instead of names, the secure storage of sensitive data in a locked room, and having all transcriptions completed outside the United States where the audio files were beyond the reach of subpoena. Beyond this, we were careful to restrict our interviews to past events (albeit often quite recent past events) and to avoid inflammatory discourse that, in itself, could serve as a catalyst for offenses (e.g., retaliatory violence).

Interviews were audio-recorded and then transcribed verbatim. These files were coded with identification tags corresponding to relevant research issues. The tags permitted us to retrieve information about various predetermined research interests. The breadth of initial tags was generally broad and focused on the variables of primary interest (victimization and responses to it). Then we sifted through the data categories and engaged in detailed analysis of variance across cases, such as those in which law was mobilized in response to victimization. Specifically, we read through the broader categories and, for each issue, created narrower categories that capture distinctions recognized by prior research and the dealers themselves as being relevant (see Glasser and Strauss 1967). Put succinctly, we read through each interview transcription individually, searching for events and descriptions that shed light on the research questions at hand: Do victimized drug dealers ask the government for help? If so, how—meaning in what way—do they do so?

Following Katz (2004), we make use of extended, unbroken quotes in which dealers “speak in their own contextualized and historically specific vocabularies” (p. 83). This allows us to “show the people” (ibid.) apart from our interpretation of them and their actions. This is a useful presentational and analytic technique in that it allows for differentiating (1) what happened according to the participants from (2) what happened as viewed through our scholarly knowledge based on prior work by others and ourselves. Obviously, we hope to combine these two perspectives into a unified understanding, but by quoting long stretches of conversation we leave the door open for alternative interpretations and verification by others. In the quotes provided and discussed below, we use pseudonyms to refer to all respondents.

Criminal Concealment

One way that offenders report their drug market–related victimizations to the police is by keeping the context of the crime secret. Rather than “BS” or report a separate offense, the victim simply does not tell the whole truth. This type of nonmanipulative police mobilization is termed “criminal concealment.”

Such instances are scarcely documented in the existing literature. One of the few comes from Anderson’s (1999) ethnography of street life in Philadelphia. A drug dealer he spoke with, John, recounted a time when a “girl had stole $250 worth crack. I go around the crib knocking on the door—boom, boom. . . . I’m banging on the door early in the morning. [“]Get my shit, bitch[”]. . . . Then she calls the cops because I was disturbing her. Now, I don’t wanta tell the cops what I’m at her house for, that she got my shit [drugs]” (p. 272). While not mentioned explicitly, it stands to reason that the complainant also refrained from explaining to the police why John was at her door. Another example comes from New York City: “Mike began robbing drug dealers on his own, and on one occasion . . . he used a TEC-9 to rob two young drug dealers in a public park and boarded a city bus to go home. The young dealers, however, alerted two police officers sitting nearby in a patrol car, who chased the bus, catching Mike and charging him with the robbery, possession of a weapon and a variety of other charges” (Curtis and Wendel 2007, 879). Again, whether dealers reported the full details of the victimization to the police is unknown, but we can easily imagine that they did not. A third example comes from a college newspaper:

A University alumnus was arrested last night after police responded to an attempted burglary at the students’ own home. [He] was charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. . . . [He] was burglarized on Monday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., but called police again on Wednesday when he said he was burglarized again. According to the report, [the student] had been watching TV alone in his house when he heard a loud noise. When he looked outside he reportedly saw a black male run away from the house and into the passenger seat of a white truck. [He] gave police the driver’s license plate number. After arriving at the scene, the police observed that the windows of his car had been broken, but no items had been taken from his car or house. An officer saw “drug paraphernalia” through the windows of his car, according to the report. A subsequent search yielded an unknown quantity of marijuana and marijuana residue. [He] was transported to the Clarke County Jail. The officer took finger prints from the window of [his] house, but no suspects have been arrested yet for the robbery. (Ogunsakin 2012)

Police do not always pursue victims suspected of being offenders; an example is found in Mohamed and Fritsvold’s (2009, 145–46) ethnography of college drug dealers:

One evening . . . three armed men forcibly entered the home and operations center shared by three . . . dealers. At the time, two of the three dealers were home and the third was on campus attending a class. In classic home-invasion robbery form, while holding them at gunpoint, the robbers proceeded to restrain the two dealers with duct tape and rob them of substantial amounts of cash and drugs . . . and high-end electronics. Shortly after the robbers fled, the third dealer-roommate arrived home to find his partners still bound up. . . . [W]ithout a moment’s hesitation, these dealers . . . dialed 911. . . . When the police arrived a few minutes later, the crime victims described the robbery, the people they believed to have perpetrated the crime, and the direction in which they believed the robbers to be headed. They conspicuously left out the fact that they were drug dealers and were robbery victims for this exact reason. And, as one of the robbery victims told us, the police “totally knew what was going on.” Nonetheless, the police officers aided the victims by contacting Border Patrol officers [who . . . ] identified and apprehended the robbers as they attempted to pass through [a] checkpoint. . . . [T]he dealers were even able to recover their cash and stolen electronics, although they wisely refused to claim ownership of the marijuana also found in the car.

Two of the dealers we interviewed, Pusher and Rollin’, reported cases of criminal concealment. First, we discuss Pusher’s experience. He was the victim of two separate crimes, a robbery and a burglary. Both of his victimizations resulted in lost drugs, but he only reported one to the police. This dealer describes the events, his different responses to them, and the rationale behind his reactions:

After being robbed, Pusher just sat “back analyzing, just trying to put stuff together,” and ultimately took no action to handle the victimization. When subsequently burglarized, however, he called the cops. He did not “tell them about the drugs but” did tell “them about everything else.” Note that there is an important difference between withholding information and distorting it; the latter often is illegal and therefore manipulative (i.e., “BS”). Refraining from telling the whole truth is not manipulative because doing so is legally permissible.

Why did Pusher ask for formal help when he was burglarized, but not when he was robbed? In the robbery incident, the only items stolen were drugs. He “got like a half lump of weed, [and an] ounce and a half of crack.” This might explain why Pusher declined to report this victimization to the police. The dealer-victim was not injured during the event, and thus it did not qualify as assault or battery. With no licit items stolen, there was no legitimate way for Pusher to substantiate his robbery report without implicating himself in crime. A separate reason that Pusher reported one victimization and not the other relates to his criminal involvements beyond drug dealing. In both the robbery and the burglary Pusher’s drugs were stolen, so he had no reason to fear the police finding them in his home. Yet the two victimizations differ in that after the burglary no illegal items remained on the premises, whereas after the robbery Pusher “had all types of [other] stuff in [his] house,” he “had guns and all that.” Thus he concluded, “I couldn’t call the police when I had all that in the house.”

Another dealer, Rollin’, offered a third-party account of a drug-market victimization that was reported to the police without revealing the context in which it occurred. One of his business partners reported a burglary in which not only drugs and money were stolen but so too were priceless possessions. In discussing his partner’s response, Rollin’ contrasts the incident with a robbery against himself, noting how he and his partners usually react:

Rollin’ clearly describes factors that inhibit reporting drug market–related victimizations to the police. But his street-theorizing notwithstanding, one of his associates did report his victimization to the police. Not only had his drugs and money been stolen, but also a recording of his baby’s birth, which obviously carried sentimental value out of all proportion to its monetary worth. In a state of emotional desperation, he went to the police for help. This case is similar to the one involving Pusher. In both instances, legitimate goods were stolen along with the contraband. So like Pusher, Rollin’s associate was able to report the burglary without manipulating law or necessarily revealing his own criminal involvement. He was able to mobilize legal action against the victimizer without implicating himself in crime by reporting the theft of the TV, VCR, and camcorder, but not the lost drugs. Again, this is not legal manipulation because withholding information about your own criminal involvement is legal so long as lying does not occur in the process.

Criminal Disclosure

As already illustrated, sometimes drug traders report crimes against them to the police and, when doing so, keep the context of the victimization secret. Yet the drug underworld is not always so guarded. In some cases, victims admit their own crime to the police in the course of mobilizing law; this is known as “criminal disclosure.”

Again, the existing literature provides few examples of criminal disclosure. Copes and colleagues’ (2011) study of rock-rentals is perhaps the only investigation to delve explicitly into the topic. Although transgressions over this form of trade are a frequent source of BS, they are also reported in honesty:

While most of the lenders tried to disguise that they rented their vehicles, some were more forthright. These reports included statements such as, “Complainant contacted police and advised that he rented out his vehicle for illegal narcotics. He stated that his vehicle has not been returned” and “Complainant contacted the police and reported that his brother rented out his vehicle in exchange for crack cocaine.” (p. 159)

Like the university alumnus who concealed the context of his victimizations, the following example of criminal disclosure also resulted in the victim’s arrest; the judge who presided over the prosecution described what happened:

Your home was the subject of an aggravated robbery. Three people it seems went to your home and demanded the return of iodine and hypophosphorous acid. Both substances are used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. They apparently thought you had stolen these substances. In the course of this visit you were assaulted and had property, including your motor vehicle, stolen. You chose to call the Police. They attended your address and while they were dealing with the aggravated robbery, your response to their questions was to advise them that the robbery was due to your being involved in the manufacture of methamphetamine. You then provided the Police with considerable information regarding this manufacture, with the result the Police subsequently executed search warrants at four addresses you had informed you had set up drug making laboratories. At one of the addresses the Police located a fully operative clandestine drug laboratory where methamphetamine was being manufactured. (The Queen v. James William Grove 2008)

Two of the dealers we interviewed, Lady and Big Pimp, recounted cases of criminal disclosure. First we examine Lady’s experience. She explained how one of her customers used the law to get even with her, even though this meant revealing his lawbreaking:

After a series of disputes between Lady and her customers, the climax was reached when this dealer “had to let the dogs out on him” and they “got his ass.” Rather than retaliate in kind, the victimized customer instead went to the police. He did not manipulate his report or even keep the context secret. When the police asked why he was at Lady’s house, his answer was honest and forthcoming: “to buy some weed.” In spite of the illicit context in which the victimization occurred, the police investigated it. The police proceeded as “normal,” as though the victim’s behavior did not matter. They arrested the violent offender and put her in jail.

A dealer known on the street as Big Pimp described a more violent incident. He was the victim of a robbery during which his brother was shot and killed:

After Big Pimp gained consciousness and saw his dead, or at least dying, sibling, his first response was to “beat . . . on people’s door to call the police.” He perceived the murder of his brother as being far more important than any problems that may arise from revealing his involvement in drug dealing. In the end, it was too late for Big Pimp’s brother, but not too late for Big Pimp. After his brother’s death, he must have contemplated retaliation. But he refrained from striking back, reasoning that he “can’t afford to go to jail” because this would mean not attending his brother’s funeral. So he was like, “Shit, fuck that. I’m not gonna get”—meaning injure or murder—“no dope fiend or nothing.” The police discovered the murder was drug market–related “’cause of [his] other brother. He stayed there with [the] baby brother. So they know what happened,” but they continued to investigate the case and eventually arrested a suspect. The prevailing local honor code may have counseled against snitching, but in spite of this Big Pimp was “gonna go talk to some detectives.” Maybe he resisted initially, but his mother talked him into it. “I got to go in and identify the picture.” On his way out from the interview with us, Big Pimp said his next stop was the police station to be interviewed by detectives.

A Typology of Police Mobilization by Victimized Drug Traders

Compared to law-abiding persons, drug traders are at greater risk of victimization because they are more reluctant to seek police redress (Goldstein 1985; Jacobs 2000; Jacobs and Wright 2006; Wright and Decker 1997). That reluctance, however, may be overridden in certain circumstances, however rare. Probabilities notwithstanding, drug traders sometimes do respond to victimization by mobilizing the police.

With that made clear, our other objective in this paper has been to delineate how this happens. Previous research has examined how individuals victimized in the context of drug market trade manipulate law to get even. They either (1) make false or misleading statements, which is what the cops call BS (Moskos 2008), or (2) refrain from reporting their own victimization but instead report other crimes committed by the perpetrator, which in the streets is called getting over (Rosenfeld, Jacobs, and Wright 2003; Topalli 2005). ⁴

Experiences recounted to us by drug dealers demonstrate that victim-criminals do not always resort to manipulation when making a police report (also see Copes et al. 2011; Mohamed and Fritsvold 2009). In some cases, they make nonmanipulative victimization reports to police (3) without reporting their own lawbreaking and, thus, engage in criminal concealment. In other cases, victim-criminals (4) admit the drug market context of the victimization and take part in criminal disclosure.

Taken together, these four methods comprise the conceptually distinct ways that victimized drug traders mobilize police for help in punishing wrongdoers; see Table 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

How Victimized Drug Traders Mobilize Police.

		Lies about Victimization	Reports Victimization	Reveals Illicit Context
Manipulative	BSing	+	+	−
	Getting over	−	−	−
Nonmanipulative	Criminal concealment	−	+	−
	Criminal disclosure	−	+	+

Note: ‘+’ = presence of characteristic; ‘−’ = absence of characteristic.

These forms of police mobilization vary in three aspects: whether the victim lies to police, whether the victimization motivating the report is the crime actually reported, and whether the victim engages in complete disclosure of the victimization’s criminal context.

Theorizing Police Mobilization among Victimized Drug Traders

Many explanatory factors may serve to discourage victimized drug traders from going to the law for help. By and large, such offenders are unwilling to cooperate with the police, even under extraordinary circumstances, so it is hardly surprising that this occurred infrequently among members of our sample. Although rare, such cases are important to study because their exceptionality illuminates factors that facilitate citizen cooperation with the legal system.

Future research should build on the present work by theorizing the behaviors we have typologized. Specifically, theorists should strive to answer two interrelated questions about why victimized drug traders mobilize the law: (1) Generally, why do victimized drug traders sometimes mobilize law instead of resorting to another form of social control, such as retaliation, informal settlement, negotiation, avoidance, or toleration? ⁵ (2) And when drug traders do mobilize the law, why do they use one method instead of another, be it by BSing, getting over, criminal concealment, or criminal disclosure? Although this paper cannot fully answer these questions, allow us to provide illustrative examples by drawing on the four perspectives most commonly used to explain the absence of law: rationality; culture; police legitimacy; and, social structure. Keep in mind that the following discussion includes only a few examples of possible explanations, and that the full array of theoretical possibilities should be developed.

Rational factors may facilitate police mobilization. For example, when a criminal-victim is not in possession of or under the influence of drugs, then evidence of lawbreaking is not available and thus not punishable. Or, if victimization involves violence or theft of noncriminal items, such as money or jewelry, then victims can report the crime without necessarily implicating themselves. Thus, it is sometimes possible for victims to ask for formal mediation without revealing their own offenses to the government (see, e.g., Copes, Forsyth, and Brunson 2007; Mohamed and Fritsvold 2009, 145–46). In such incidents, we might expect criminal concealment to be more likely than disclosure, BSing, or getting over.

Another aspect of rationality involves the seriousness of the offenses. The more minor and less punishable a victim’s crime when compared to the victimization suffered, the more rational is a request for formal mediation. In some cases, the costs of making a report may be low compared to those associated with other potential reactions; this situation especially applies when comparing calling the police to alternative lines of action such as retaliation, which may result in imprisonment. In short, then, victimized offenders may perceive that the benefits of obtaining formal justice outweigh the costs of disclosing their own criminal involvement.

Cultural theories view social behavior as a learned adaptation that stems from a common set of values, attitudes, and beliefs in a community (Sutherland 1937). Although many criminals live by an honor culture that militates against formal mediation, it is well known that people do not always adhere to the behaviors prescribed by their culture. They address this discrepancy by drawing on neutralization techniques (Sykes and Matza 1957). For instance, people with a law-abiding culture may break the law on occasion but they justify their illegal actions by condemning the condemners or by denying responsibility, injury, or a victim (ibid.). The flipside of this situation occurs when people with an oppositional culture are “good”; for example, they make a report to police rather than retaliate (Topalli 2005). Again, this conduct is made possible by their use of similar neutralization techniques. Criminals may claim that they had to make a report, that no one was harmed by it, or that the victimizer deserved it. These kinds of neutralization techniques may be used to explain police mobilization in general or specific types. Such neutralizations seem especially likely to produce manipulative mobilization since they allow victims to simultaneously punish victimizers and deceitfully take advantage of the police.

The literature on police legitimacy suggests that victims are more likely to mobilize police for assistance when they are viewed as procedurally fair (Tyler 2004). While many drug traders accumulate experiences that lead them to hold negative views regarding police legitimacy (Anderson 1999; Brunson 2007), this is not always the case. Since whites, for example, generally have greater confidence in police than blacks (Tyler 2004), we might expect white dealers to more often mobilize police than do black dealers when victimized. Moreover, we might expect dealers of the same ilk—such as blacks or whites—to rely on police mobilization to different degrees depending on the ability of police in their respective neighborhoods to foster a positive perception of legitimacy. In other words, because views of police legitimacy are not a constant across neighborhoods, then neither should be the rate of police mobilization by victimized drug dealers across communities.

The social structural approach argues that drug market participants are unlikely to mobilize law because they are low in normative status. But status is not the only predictor of law enforcement included in such theories (Black 1976; Cooney 2009). Social distance is another component, with further distance being theorized to facilitate more law enforcement. Many drug markets, especially those situated in urban disadvantaged neighborhoods, are open virtually to anyone. Strangers often do business with each other (Jacobs 1999). Thus, the social distance between victim and offender may provide a structural foundation for formal mediation, despite the low social status of the persons involved. This theory may provide a general basis for understanding whether victimizations are reported to police, managed with retaliation, or handled with a less severe form of social control such as toleration or avoidance (see Black 1998; Cooney 2009).

Arresting the Spread of Violence

It is widely accepted by the public, law enforcement officials, and criminologists alike that victimized drug traders are reluctant to mobilize police and therefore are likely to take the law into their own hands by retaliating (Jacques 2010). Researchers long have recognized that the retaliatory conflict spirals set in motion by drug market victimizations play a major role in the contagion of violence (Jacobs and Wright 2006; Wright and Decker 1997; Topalli, Wright, and Fornango 2002).

In the past, scholars have proposed that one way to inhibit these retaliatory conflict spirals is to allow victimized illicit drug traders to make a police complaint without fear of putting their own legal standing in jeopardy:

Although those who break the law may appear undeserving of the benefits of formal justice, the cost of denying them those benefits is that many will resort to informal methods of dispute resolution. The resulting crime and violence are not easily contained, threatening populations at far remove from the original disputants. Altering the relationship between police and street criminals could help constrain the spread of retaliatory violence. . . . [T]he bulk of street crime consists of property offenses, simple assaults, and low-level drug dealing. Persons who engage in these activities on a regular basis make up a disproportionate share of crime victims. Widening their access to legal resources could reduce their reliance on informal means of dispute resolution, and help contain the spread of contagious violence. (Rosenfeld, Jacobs, and Wright 2003, 307–8; also see Jacobs and Wright 2006; Topalli, Wright, and Fornango 2002)

The feasibility of this proposal rests on the willingness of drug traders to involve the police in their victimizations, and for police to take such complaints seriously. Our study indicates that contrary to popular belief, this already happens in some cases (also see Copes, Forsyth, and Brunson 2007; Copes et al. 2011; Mohamed and Fritsvold 2009; Topalli 2005).

Instances in which victimized drug traders nonmanipulatively seek police assistance represent important opportunities to reduce the possibility of retaliation and its associated ills. Police simply need to take the complaint seriously and handle it as they would any other reported crime, leaving it to the courts to decide if the circumstances of the offense mitigate its seriousness. And while manipulative mobilization presents the police with more difficulties, even here it is important for them to take the report seriously unless and until it can be shown to be complete BS. When police are called into “real” victimizations of drug traders, they should act neutrally, show concern, treat everyone with respect, and allow each person to tell their side of the story (Tyler 2004). The fact that criminals are often networked (see, e.g., Brunson 2007; Wright and Decker 1994, 1997) suggests that word will spread that the police are willing to act in good faith and thereby encourage offenders to report crimes against them instead of taking the law into their own hands.

How Victimized Deviants Mobilize Police

This study has suggested a variety of circumstances in which the law may be mobilized by one particular deviant population, namely, illicit drug traders. But many other deviants confront this problem as well. Future ethnographic research should explore the relevance of our typology for other deviant populations. Our preliminary hypothesis is that the four categories of police mobilization we have identified may apply to a wide range of criminal and noncriminal deviant groups. But, if so, how exactly is that application enacted in any given case? And does our four-category typology exhaust the range of mobilization possibilities? These are the sorts of questions that might fruitfully be pursued by other ethnographic researchers.

For example, when prostitutes and undocumented immigrants are raped, robbed, or otherwise taken advantage of they may fear reporting the victimization because doing so can lead to their own legal troubles. All members of the offender caste—such as “career criminals” involved in robbery, burglary, shoplifting, et cetera—have reasons to be hesitant about calling the cops when wronged; there may be a warrant out for their arrest or they may adhere to a culture that is averse to “snitching.” Despite such concerns, we suspect that across a variety of offense types, some criminals will report their victimizations to law enforcement officials, if only rarely (see, e.g., García and Keyes 2012; Jenness 1993; Topalli 2005). A question for future research is whether, how, and why the nature of different crimes affects the ways in which criminals mobilize police when victimized. For instance, do prostitutes, undocumented immigrants, and robbers have somewhat different concerns about interacting with police and, therefore, a different array of methods for requesting their assistance?

Of course, criminals are not the only sort of deviants. Even when obeying the law, people’s deviant status may make them apprehensive about invoking legal assistance when victimized. This assertion conceivably could apply to deviants like adulterers, swingers, and gamblers who are victimized in the course of being deviant. Although making a police report has little or no chance of leading to their own arrest (assuming they are not also criminals), it can result in informal consequences such as ostracism by family and friends. For this reason, non-criminal deviants may be motivated to keep their deviance secret too (see Goffman 1963). Thus when mobilizing police they may BS, get over on the victimizer, conceal what they were doing at the time of victimization or—alternatively—disclose it. The question, then, is whether, how, and why noncriminal deviants of all types go about marshaling formal justice when victimized.

Inconvenient Phenomena and Interesting Ideas

While some scholars suggest that good typologies and theories are simple (Cooney and Phillips 2002; Kuhn 1977; Popper 2002 [1959]), social life does not always conform to this preference. Were we, for example, to listen only to portrayals of conflict management in the criminal underworld provided by the media, law enforcement officials, or criminologists, we would conclude that it is in a state of virtual anarchy where law is always absent and retaliation always rules. But when we ask criminals about their lives—and do not force response categories on them—we find that the true state of affairs is far more complex.

As described by Duneier (2011, 2; also see Weber 1946), inconvenient phenomena, or inconvenient facts, are findings that disrupt what is “known.” To uncover such a fact is to throw a wrench into the everyday scientific machinery. Although inconvenient phenomena cause problems for normal science, they have an upside. Davis (1971) suggests that, broadly speaking, ideas fall into two categories: “interesting” ones that attract attention and “noninteresting” ones that do not. In part, what makes an idea interesting to someone is the degree to which it contrasts with their knowledge, especially their common sense. Thus, inconvenient phenomena are, by their very nature, interesting. As evidenced throughout the history of social science, breakthrough ideas are those that are interesting—that is, disruptive to the taken-for-granted knowledge of the era (Davis 1971).

The ethnographic method’s open-ended and inductive nature makes it perfectly suited for discovering inconvenient phenomena and interesting ideas. In Sex and Repression in Savage Society, for example, Malinowski (1927) demonstrated that the Oedipus Complex is not universal. In Outsiders, Becker (1997) showed that labeling persons as deviants causes deviance. And in Street Corner Society, Whyte (1943) revealed that so-called disorganized communities are just the opposite. Rather than collect and use data to verify an existing theory or conception of the world, these researchers allowed the data to speak for themselves and thereby uncovered an alternative understanding of reality. In doing so, these and other ethnographic studies have fundamentally changed what was and is known about social life.

Our results serve as an example of what are inconvenient facts and, we hope, interesting ideas. By and large, a substantial group of people—including our recent selves—have “known” that drug traders do not respond to victimization by mobilizing police. Increasingly, however, a new and much smaller group of scholars know that this is not invariably the case (Copes, Forsyth, and Brunson 2007; Copes et al. 2011; Moskos 2008; Taylor 2007). In some ways, this new understanding is problematic because it requires rethinking many of the other currently “known” aspects of illegal drug markets and crime generally. For example, criminologists have asserted that the inability of criminals to seek formal redress makes them attractive targets to predators (Wright and Decker 1994, 1997; also see Jacobs 1999, 2000). But if in fact offenders do have the realistic ability to access law, even if that ability is circumscribed and limited to a particular array of circumstances, what are the implications for our understanding of predators like drug robbers, burglars, and defrauders? Our findings reveal that this sort of question needs to be addressed.

Every scientific finding is at risk of being displaced by inconvenient truths (see Kuhn 1962). We should not fret over this reality, as new and inconvenient ideas are interesting. These “problems” are the morsels of discovery that push understanding forward. As scientists—and especially as ethnographers—we should embrace inconvenient findings. “The method of ethnography should accustom itself to explicitly identifying such phenomena” (Duneier 2011, 2) because, ironically, they expand the frontiers of knowledge by showing us that we are wrong, or at least not completely right.