Vera Institute of Justice

Overview

This is an overview of a research project begun in November 1990 to assess the effectiveness of Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT) in New York City. The research included community resident interviews, analysis of TNT operations, ethnographic study of local drug sellers and consumers, and panel interviews with community residents and leaders. It concludes that it is difficult to determine whether any apparent "drying up" of drug markets resulted from the enforcement intitiative, but that advantages due to the study's quasi-experimental design and multi-method approach as a means of assessing the community-level effects of targeted street-level drug enforcement are evident.