ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Taylor and Wilkinson also focus on the topic of violence, specifically violent aggression that occurs in the context of drug market activity. In order to illustrate their points, they use data from two studies of the drug market trade in New York to provide insight on the importance of situational elements in affecting offenders’ decision-making processes. Their discussion of the dynamic nature of interpersonal transactions between the participants in violent events, the role of dangerous environments in perpetuating violence, and how the presence of guns affects the outcomes speaks to the notion that transactions among actors and their environment can be complex, yet still patterned—one of the core points of a crime emergence perspective. When taken together with the preceding two chapters, this demonstrates that scholars interested in explaining similar outcomes under an emergence framework need not use the same theoretical guideposts.
