Texas A&M University, United States.
University of Tennessee, United States.
J Health Econ. 2018 Mar;58:253-268. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2018.02.002. Epub 2018 Feb 21.
This study considers the effects of the kingpin strategy, an approach to fighting organized crime in which law-enforcement efforts focus on capturing the leaders of criminal organizations, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly constructed historical data on drug-trafficking organizations' areas of operation at the municipality level and monthly homicide data allow us to control for a rich set of fixed effects and to leverage variation in the timing of kingpin captures to estimate their effects. This analysis indicates that kingpin captures cause large and sustained increases to the homicide rate in the municipality of capture and smaller but significant effects on other municipalities where the kingpin's organization has a presence, supporting the notion that removing kingpins can have destabilizing effects throughout an organization that are accompanied by escalations in violence. We also find reductions in homicides in municipalities surrounding the municipality where kingpins are captured.
本研究考察了打击有组织犯罪的“关键人物策略”对墨西哥毒品战争中社区暴力的影响。新构建的关于贩毒组织在市级活动区域的历史数据和月度杀人数据使我们能够控制一系列丰富的固定效应，并利用关键人物逮捕时间的变化来估计其影响。这一分析表明，关键人物被捕会导致被捕市级行政区的凶杀率大幅持续上升，并对关键人物所在的其他市级行政区产生较小但显著的影响，这支持了这样一种观点，即除掉关键人物可能会使整个组织失去稳定，并伴随着暴力升级。我们还发现，在关键人物被捕的市级行政区周围的市级行政区，凶杀案数量有所减少。
