If the low level gangs knew that cops would remain present on those corners, would the shooting wars erupt when there was a power vacuum? Looking at these gangs as rational economic players, it makes sense to fight over a limited, highly valuable resource(the street corner). It doesn't make sense to fight over it if it's value is extremely reduced(because cops will be stationed there all the time).
The gangs attack each other's higher level members outside the area, meaning broad daylight shootings at some high end restaurant or Starbucks parking lot. There is already a heavy police presence outside the numerous injection sites here all day long it doesn't seem to matter at all in restricting the organized sale of fentanyl. I think you would need to quadruple the budget of the police department to try any real sustained crackdown, and you would have to build new prisons as the current ones are already to capacity.
Nobody will vote for the city mayor who wants to significantly jack up property taxes to pay for a new drug crackdown when every voter knows it's largely a tried and failed, unsustainable policy. It would be vastly cheaper to just pour money into gang recruitment discouragement, and hand out free heroin undercutting the gang's product which is what they've started to do here.
to some extent, it's a prisoner's dilemma. if all the different gangs can agree not to kill each other for territory, everyone involved is better off on average. but in the short term there's still a huge incentive to be the first gang to defect and take a bunch of territory. from the perspective of an individual actor, it can be rational to do something that decreases the size of the overall pie if you can take a large enough fraction for yourself.
