Measuring the effectiveness of drug law enforcement

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Willis, Katie
Anderson, Jessica
Homel, Peter
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2011
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Abstract

Measuring the impact of drug law enforcement (DLE) practice on illicit drug markets is a notoriously difficult task. Conventional approaches to assessing DLE performance focus on the use of drug seizure and arrest data. However, these data say more about the extent to which police engage in certain types of activities and allocate resources than they do about DLE effectiveness because offences relating to illicit drugs are far more likely to be detected by law enforcement agencies than reported to them. As such, the more effort and resources DLE invest in detecting illicit drugs, the more likely it is that drugs will be seized. On the  one hand, DLE can potentially claim success for not seizing any drugs—that is, based   on the absence of seizures and arrests, it could be argued that there is no drug problem. Conversely, a lack of seizures and arrests could lay police open to substantial criticism for failing to address the drug problem.

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Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice

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2011

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406

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© 2011 Australian Institute of Criminology. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version.

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Criminology not elsewhere classified

Criminology

Law

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