Street drug markets beyond favelas in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Elenice Oliveira,Braulio Figueiredo Alves Silva,Marcos Oliveira Prates

doi:10.1186/s40163-015-0048-z

Elenice Oliveira, Braulio Figueiredo Alves Silva + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-015-0048-z

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Abstract

This study examines whether social disorganization mechanisms that explain clusters of street drug markets in socially disorganized neighborhoods in developed countries can also help explain geographical patterns of drug dealing across neighborhoods in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Data for this study includes drug arrests from 2007 to 2011 and socio demographic data from the 2010 Census. To examine the influence of exploratory variables on drug market locations, the Negative Binominal regression model was used at two levels of analysis—the Belo Horizonte city center and other neighborhoods including favelas. The findings show that a high hot spot of street drug markets located in the city center is positively associated with housing quality as well as negatively associated with residential tenure. Low hot spots were found in remaining neighborhoods, including impoverished areas of favelas and are related to key social disorganization indicators such as socio-economic status, age at risk, and residential tenure. This study has important implications for crime prevention policies and provides the basis for further comparative research on street drug markets across many different countries.

Highlights

The explosion of the transnational organized crime of drug trafficking, mainly cocaine, in the 1980s has had a local impact on the emergence of street drug markets in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the large metropolises of developing as well as advanced nations
This study identifies the geographical patterns of street drug markets in Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest cities, and analyzes how the conditions of social organization in neighborhoods can influence the location of these markets at the city level as well as across neighborhoods
Belo Horizonte is divided into 3937 census tracts (36 out of the total are concentrated in the city center) with an average of 600 residents per tract (2010 Census)

Summary

Introduction

The explosion of the transnational organized crime of drug trafficking, mainly cocaine, in the 1980s has had a local impact on the emergence of street drug markets in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the large metropolises of developing as well as advanced nations. While criminologists in the US have traditionally used the social disorganization theory to examine the geographical locations and characteristics of drug markets (Saxe et al 2001; Sun et al 2004; Freisthler et al 2005; Martinez et al 2008; Lipton et al 2013) this same theory has not yet been tested to examine the same problem in the context of developing nations, especially Brazil. This study tests the classical social disorganization variables to examine variations on the geographical patterns of street drug markets across neighborhoods in a large Brazilian city. This study might contribute to a new line of comparative research into street drugs markets, shedding new light on the similarities and differences in social disorganization mechanisms that create hospitable conditions for these markets in different regions, as well as generate new insights into the prevention and control of these markets in deprived

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