Abstract
Objectives
A high number of street dealers operate in the Red Light District in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. To displace the dealers, the Municipality of Amsterdam installed text-based light projections in a street attracting a high number of dealers.
Methods
To evaluate the intervention, we did a pre-post analysis of video footage from two CCTV cameras located in the street. In total, we analyzed 765 one-minute segments of footage from before and after the implementation.
Results
The implementation was followed by a four percentage point reduction in street dealers. However, the estimated effect shows fragileness with wide confidence intervals and a p-value just below 0.05, and a Bayesian robustness analysis suggests that the intervention was not associated with the outcome.
Conclusions
Analyzing CCTV-footage offers a unique avenue for evaluating small scale interventions in open-air drug markets. While we observed a decrease in the presence of dealers, the intervention still needs further validation.
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Data availability
The data of the study is available as supplementary material using the link supplied in the methods section (https://tinyurl.com/bdfj9auj).
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Ejbye-Ernst, ., Moeller, K., Liebst, L.S. et al. “It’s illegal to buy drugs from street dealers”—a video-based pre-post study of a behavioral intervention to displace dealers from an Amsterdam open-air drug market. J Exp Criminol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-023-09602-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-023-09602-9