American society expects urban police forces to devote their efforts to detecting and controlling street criminals. The police have responded to this expectation with intensive patrols, crackdowns, sweeps, and sophisticated covert operations – all designed to attack street criminals on their own turf. As a result, the underworld of urban street criminals is saturated with law enforcement. It is ironic, therefore, that there is probably no other setting in which recourse to the protection of the law is less available. This state of affairs is doubly ironic because urban street criminals, compared with their law-abiding counterparts, are much more vulnerable to crime.

As we noted in Chapter One, criminals are often reticent to report being victimized to the police for fear of exposing their own illicit activities. And even if they do make a police report, they are unlikely to be taken seriously because of a widespread belief among officers that lawbreakers deserve whatever fate befalls them. For all practical purposes, then, street criminals cannot really be victims in the eyes of the law; they are on their own when it comes to seeing justice done.

This implies that criminal retaliation is merely a response to the perceived unavailability of law – and to an extent this is true. But there are deeper reasons why criminal victims might choose retaliation over making an official police report, even when they might be taken seriously and could do so without risk to themselves.