The Impact of Arresting Gang Leaders on Organized Armed Violence in Drug Markets

In this dissertation, I argue that arresting the leaders of drug-selling gangs is a precise and impactful tactic for reducing gun violence in open-air drug markets. I construct a theory of leadership arrests in drug markets by building on rationalist mechanisms. To test my theory, I utilize two original datasets. Both were constructed using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses from the Chicago Police Department, open-source data, and archival court documents. However, one of the datasets—covering January 2019 to May 2023—was constructed through direct field observations of drug markets on the Westside of Chicago. This is the first dataset that includes a systematic identification of (eighty) individual drug-selling spots within (twenty-three) drug markets. Statistical analysis shows that arresting gang leaders is associated with significant reductions in gun violence in drug markets. Two separate chapters are devoted to testing two of the most important assumptions in my theory of leadership removals. Chapter 3 tests the assumption that law enforcement allocates drug enforcement actions towards especially violent drug markets. To answer this question, I statistically analyzed a dataset of twenty-two Chicago police districts, with drug arrests as the dependent variable, and geo-located drug markets with above-average violence as the main explanatory variable. Chapter 4 tests the assumption that drug-selling gangs violently compete for drug market share as rational actors. I test this assumption by building a theory of competitive violence in drug markets, and statistically analyze a dataset with mass shootings in Chicago as the dependent variable and opioid overdose deaths—a proxy for drug demand—as the main explanatory variable. The empirical results of chapters 2 and 3 support the assumptions made in the theory of leadership removals.