Risk calculation and precautionary uncertainty: two configurations within crime assessment

This paper explores two configurations of thinking about crime amongst law enforcement agencies and private sector security managers: ‘risk calculation’ (concerned with everyday, calculable probabilities and impacts and their management) and ‘precautionary uncertainty’ (concerned with events that might be incapacitating, yet are not calculable by probability assessments). The paper explores their respective constituent concepts and fields of application in crime assessment, drawing upon qualitative research-in-progress in Belgium. Risk calculation, as applied to crime, starts with past data on routines that link perpetrators with targets that lack capable guardians. Precautionary uncertainty focuses on potential impacts that are highly disabling and potentially wide-spreading (contagion, knock-on effects), asking how such impacts can be contained and recovered from. Risk and uncertainty are shown to be related to ‘rational-instrumental’ and ‘deliberative-constitutive’ approaches as developed by Fisher’s work in the field of law, which offers a meta-narrative in relation to which they can be positioned. Finally, the paper asks if these two crime assessment methods should be seen as distinct or as merging. On the basis of criteria of conceptual sharpness, openness to public debate and justiciability, the authors champion the maintenance of a clear distinction between risk and uncertainty.     

Exploring Itinerant Crime Groups

Starting a decade ago, property crimes by Eastern European crime gangs have gained attention of Belgian law enforcement agencies. Due to the mobile nature of these groups, the term ‘itinerant crime groups’ has been used. The aim of this article is to explore what is incorporated in this term. By analyzing 27 case files, a large degree of variation is revealed. Groups differ in size, organizational structure, offender characteristics, the crimes in which they are involved and the methods they use. Following these features, two main types of itinerant crime groups can be distinguished, each with their own diversity. As such, the observed heterogeneity is larger than we might suspect by looking at the policy definition of the phenomenon.     

Measuring organised crime-related harms: exploring five policing methods

Many law enforcement agencies around the world have adopted risk assessment methodologies to analyse organised crime. These assessments, which are intended to provide law enforcement management with rigourous analysis to enable rational and objective decision-making processes, are an integral part of intelligence-led policing. Despite the prevalence of these assessments, as the assessments and their methodologies are often tightly restricted within the law enforcement community, it is often unclear how law enforcement defines, analyses and makes decisions about organised crime. While the use of risk assessment methodology in policing to analyse organised crime is generally under-evaluated, critics point to serious methodological weaknesses. Another less-explored aspect in the scholarly literature is how law enforcement conceptualises and measures the impact of “harm” from organised crime and uses this analysis to inform priority-setting processes. This article explores how law enforcement assesses organised crime-related harm by examining five policing methods—one each from Australia and the Netherlands and three from the United Kingdom. The article finds that the methods have significant shortcomings: the main concepts are generally ill-defined and the operationalisation of these concepts is problematic. More importantly, the problems evident in the harm methods raise several critical questions, specifically whether measuring organised crime-related harms is empirically feasible and, if so, can be undertaken in a manner that meaningfully informs law enforcement’s decision-making and limits undue political interference.     

Comparing Discourse to Officer Perceptions: The Problems of War and Militarization in Wildlife Crime Enforcement

‘War’ has become a common model and metaphor for biodiversity conservation in Africa. By discussing the specific challenges of wildlife crime enforcement in Uganda, this article challenges the ‘war on wildlife crime’ discourse. It concludes that in the context of Uganda, the discourse is profoundly unhelpful because of a lack of alignment between the problems highlighted by Ugandan law enforcement officers interviewed and the solutions typically favoured in the ‘wars on crime’. Most wildlife crimes are subsistence-driven and interviewees’ requests are for basic equipment and conventional capacity building. Findings demonstrate that the language of war, militarization and securitization should be used with caution as it risks constructing an image of wildlife crime that is misleading—and one that prevents responses that are effective in the long term.     

The Roma in Bulgaria’ s Criminal Justice System: From Ethnic Profiling to Imprisonment

This paper examines the use of ethnic-specific crime data by law enforcement authorities as an instrument to formulate policies. The focus is on Bulgaria – one of the few East European countries whose criminal justice system keeps data on ethnicity – and the country’s Roma population. During the 1990s, Bulgaria’ s deep economic and social crisis impacted significantly on Bulgaria’ s Roma minority and, arguably, led to an increase in crime rates amongst the Roma. To date, however, the Bulgarian government has failed to adequately address this situation. The main argument that this paper puts forward is that over-policing of the Roma minority is a consequence of lack of adequate data on the Roma’ s involvement in crime, coupled with a crime-fighting strategy that is largely based on ethnic prejudice. As a result, a disproportionate number of Roma end-up in prisons or in long-term detention. Former inmates, in turn, influence their communities and establish a ‘revolving cycle’ of crime and social marginalisation, which is manifested in an increasing critical mass of the Roma male population in the criminal justice system.     

The crime control industry and the management of the surplus population

This essay examines what we are calling the ‘crime control industry’ and how the growth of such an industry relates to growing inequality and the need to ‘manage’ or ‘contain’ the ‘surplus population.’ Profits are a major moving force in this process, rather than the goal of reducing crime and suffering. An important component of this industry is the ‘prison industrial complex,’ one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. Also included is a rapidly growing private security industry that includes private police and security guards, along with a growing supply of technology to aid in the ‘war on crime.’ Other components include drug testing companies, gated communities, and a booming gun industry. We conclude by outlining possible explanations for the growth of this industry.     

Reducing and preventing organised crime: An evidence-based critique

Theory and practice in crime prevention and crime reduction have developed and changed significantly, but attention has been focused largely upon conventional forms of crime (especially street crime) and upon situational approaches to their reduction. Drawing on research with a variety of relevant organisations across Europe, this article explores the possibilities of developing more effective crime reduction strategies in respect of organized crime, an area in which (despite important exceptions, particularly in relation to financial regulation), law enforcement rather than prevention has continued to dominate the thinking and the practical responses of the police and other relevant agencies. It illustrates the difficulties of evaluating prevention in the many areas in which data quality on crime levels and their organisation are poor, but also gives examples (mainly financial crime) where private sector data quality are good enough to demonstrate effectiveness. It differentiates impact on crime from impact on the organisation of crime, and between market crimes involving voluntary vice and predatory crimes involving direct harm to victims, concluding that current performance indicators for enforcement agencies may need substantial revision if the focus shifts to organised crime reduction.     

Evidence on women trafficked for sexual exploitation: A rights based analysis

The aim of this paper is to investigate which factors influence the pattern of enforcement (violation) of basic rights among women trafficked for sexual exploitation. A conceptual framework is adopted where the degree of agency and the possibility to influence the terms of sex-based transactions are seen as conditional on the enforcement of some basic rights. Using data collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on women assisted by the organization after having been trafficked for sexual exploitation, we investigate the enforcement (violation) of five uncompromisable rights, namely the right to physical integrity, to move freely, to have access to medical care, to use condoms, and to exercise choice over sexual services. By combining classification tree analysis and ordered probit estimation we find that working location and country of work are the main determinants of rights enforcement, while individual and family characteristics play a marginal role. Specifically, we find that (1) in lower market segments working on the street is comparatively less ‘at risk’ of rights violation; (2) there is no consistently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ country of work, but public awareness on trafficking within the country is important; (3) the strength of organised crime in the country of work matters only in conjunction with other local factors, and (4) being trafficked within one’s country, as opposed to being trafficked internationally, is associated with higher risk of rights violation.     

Pretend It Doesn'T Work: The ‘Anti-Social’ Bias In The Maryland Scientific Methods Scale

The social constructs and methodological principles embodied in the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale (SMS), comprising part of the Campbell Collaboration in Crime and Justice assessment protocol, induce a series of biases in the evaluation of evidence of crime prevention policy interventions that focus on collective social phenomena, such as communities. Applying these principles leads to negative conclusions about effectiveness; yet their inherent ‘anti-social’ bias may induce Type II error with regard to the desirability of ‘social’ interventions to reduce crime. Policy-making is poorly served as a result. This point is illustrated, first, through a scrutiny of the social constructs used, including those that typify treatments, institutional settings and units of analysis. These are seen as being constructed in a way that is congenial to the underlying methodological issue of ‘control’ but that constitute nevertheless a distorted definition of the governance issues involved in crime reduction in community settings. A model more appropriate for evaluating voluntaristic action in civil society is needed. Second, it is suggested that this methodological bias arises particularly in policy interventions and change programmes that address issues concerning the ‘collective efficacy’ of local communities in reducing crime. An empirical exemplification of these arguments is presented with reference to a completed evaluation research study (Foster and Hope, 1993).     

Preventing Wildlife Crimes: Solutions That Can Overcome the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

The 'tragedy of the commons' dilemma occurs when individuals working independently of one another, will overuse a common-property resource for short-term benefits while decimating the resource for long-term use (Hardin 1968). This is often found in the field of wildlife crimes where species become overexploited to increase short-term profits while endangering and eliminating a natural resource for future users. Wildlife crimes suffering from the ‘tragedy’ need to be prevented in order for species to avoid extinction while also conserving a natural resource that monetarily benefits numerous people and their respective communities. Current approaches to the illegal wildlife trade include implementing trade bans or regulatory schemes at the national and international level, yet their effectiveness of reducing the trade is unknown. Perhaps, a better approach in reducing the illegal wildlife trade is a combination of making it more difficult to poach (i.e. situational crime prevention) and incentivizing locals to abstain from poaching. This paper will first review the literature on wildlife crimes and then use a case study approach that will examine the literature on the illegal parrot trade, the market for wildlife skins, and over-fishing. Through these case studies, a comprehensive review of the problem will be detailed as well as innovative conservation solutions that show promise in reducing the poaching and exploitation of species. Amongst these solutions will be the use of situational crime prevention that has shown immediate reductions in crime when tailored towards highly-targeted areas and crimes.     

The Goods Transport Network’s Vulnerability to Crime: Opportunities and Control Weaknesses

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study into the goods transport sector and its vulnerability to crime. Based on 33 interviews with professionals and law enforcement agents, four interviews with convicted criminals, 26 case files from the Belgian Federal Police and the customs services and 9 informal conversations with law enforcement agency personnel, academics and professionals, the paper analyses what structures, mechanisms, conditions and interdependencies make the goods transport network susceptible to criminal activity. It is suggested that vulnerability to crime is twofold, consisting of opportunities based on weak sector conditions and weak regulation. It will be demonstrated that small and medium enterprises present particular opportunities for criminal exploitation due to their weaker financial position and the lack of crime prevention measures in place. The study found no criminal ‘front’ structures that are transport businesses alone, because of the high start-up costs within the industry; rather, non-transport companies are exploited to connect to the legal transport sector. Finally, the paper identifies key weaknesses in the sector, asking whether there should be due diligence or regulatory duties for certain roles in the supply chain like shipping agents.     

War,crime, empire and cosmopolitanism

The millions of deaths produced by states and governments make the 20th century ‘unnameable’, a century far more lethal than all previous ‘pre-civil’ epochs. It does not appear that contemporary state violence tends to decline or to temper the brutality commonly attributed to archaic armies, nor that the rules and limitations internationally imposed on that violence, throughout the last decades, have reduced its effects. The 20th century having gone, and while hope was growing that mass murder and destruction would also go with it, recent events appear to suggest that the twenty-first century is poised to become unnameable in its turn. In this paper a reflection is presented of the notion of war as annihilation, which emerges in contemporary international conflicts. This is followed by a review of the debate on the relationship between war, empire and crime. As a logical extension of the argument developed, war is described as a particularly devastating form of crime of the powerful. Finally, reflecting on the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the discussion suggests that such a concept may offer legitimacy to those who invest their enthusiasm in supporting contemporary wars as well as to those who fight against them. The latter may find inspiration in the idea of a ‘critical’ cosmopolitanism.     

Legitimate rackets: Tax evasion,tax avoidance,and the boundaries of legality

Corporate crime is not the only means by which business can escape legal control. Law and legal definitions can also be used and manipulated to legally avoid both control and penalties or stigma associated with outright crime. This articl analyses such ‘legitimate rackets’ via a study of tax avoidance practices among business and ‘high net worth’ individuals. It describes some of the techniques employed, analyses the difference between tax evasion (an offence) and tax avoidance, explores the ‘grey area’ at the boundaries, and draws out the implications for theory and policy.     

Perceived effects of concealed handgun ownership by private citizens among law enforcement officers in Texas

On January 1, 1996, a new law took effect in Texas granting certain state citizens the privilege to carry a concealed handgun on their person for the first time since 1871. As a result of this dramatic shift in state law, Texas is now among the growing number of states across the nation who have adopted similar statutory provisions in one form or another. While at least one empiricals study of citizen’s attitudes toward concealed handgun ownership was conducted prior to the law’s effective date, no similar efforts were undertakens to assess the beliefs, perceptions and attitudes of the state’s law enforcement officers about this important social policy. The present study was therefore undertaken in response to the lack of serious attention which the issue of concealed handgun ownership among private citizens has received as it directly relates to the law enforcement profession. Subjects for this study (N=327) were drawn from four Texas law enforcement agencies representing various organizational sizes and missions. While the responses of officers who participated in the study indicate optimism about the law’s potential to deter various types of crime, they also reflect a certain degree of concerns about concealed handgun ownership among private citizens especially as this policy directly relates to perceive inadequacies in statemandated requirements and issues affecting officer safety.     

Gender, Ethnicity, and Offending over the Life Course: Women’s Pathways to Prison in the Aloha State

This paper develops what some researchers are now calling the ‘pathways’ approach to understanding women’s criminality. This perspective argues that women’s offending is an outgrowth of histories of violence, trauma, and addiction – conditioned by race, culture, gender inequality, and class. This paper expands the perspective on crime across the life course for females, providing a more nuanced analysis of the nature of intimate relationships and developmental turning points for women. Whereas men’s assumption of adult responsibilities such as marriage and childrearing may be turning points away from delinquency and crime, the matter is far more complex and may even be the inverse for some women. The paper also finds that women of Native Hawaiian ancestry have more negative experiences with education, employment, and poorer outcomes on parole compared to women without Hawaiian ancestry, thus contributing to the literature on the relationship between ethnicity, structure, and offending over the life course.     

Talking Heads and Bleeding Hearts: Newsmaking, Emotion and Public Criminology in the Wake of a Sexual Assault

Using our own experiences in attempting to ‘do’ public criminology in the wake of a violent sexual assault on our campus, we offer a critique of the emerging public criminology framework. Focusing specifically on tensions between fact and emotion and representations of expertise in the news media, we argue for a greater respect for emotional responses to crime in moving the public criminology agenda forward. We suggest that if public criminology sets as its goal educating the public about crime with an eye towards injecting a counter/critical discourse into ‘get tough’ crime control policies, then public criminologists need to recognize and take seriously the public’s emotions rather than negate them. Drawing on the work of Ahmed (The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge, London, 2004), we suggest that the role of the expert is not to simply inform citizens of the ‘facts’ about crime, but to establish—through emotions—the relationship between themselves and the imagined criminal Other (Young in Imagining crime: Textual outlaws and criminal conversations. Sage Publications, London, 1996). Thus, alongside trying to convince the public to be more ‘rational’ when it comes to crime, critical criminologists must start to accept people’s fear and anger as legitimate reactions and try to redirect these emotions toward more productive ends.     

Toward “Safer” and “Better” Communities?: Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act,Aboriginal Youth and the Processes of Exclusion

After a decade of high incarceration rates, the Canadian Department of Justice has revised its approach to juvenile justice. Enshrined in the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), the renewed youth justice system stresses the importance and responsibility of community for crime control. While on the surface the state’s appeals to such programmes as restorative justice seem laudable, caution should be exercised in fully endorsing this approach. While community initiatives have been criticized for “widening the net of social control” and intruding state control deeper into social life, their exclusionary potential is perhaps more troubling. Following Derrida’s metaphysics of presence, I suggest that ‘community’ perpetually finds meaning in opposition to the other. In this environment, Aboriginal youth, who are among the most marginalized in Canadian society, will likely be the most unfavourably effected. This paper does not, however, entirely reject the Act’s appeal to community. Nevertheless, I argue that for meaningful challenges to contemporary constructions of community and youth justice to occur the discursive limits forced upon ‘community’ must be fractured and fashioned in ways that renounce homogeneity. We strongly believe the solution to youth crime is in the community. Give the community the ability to deal with it and they will (Canada 1997).     

A Criticism of the International Harm Principle

According to the received view crimes like torture, rape, enslavement or enforced prostitution are domestic crimes if they are committed as isolated or sporadic events, but become crimes against humanity when they are committed as part of a ‘widespread or systematic attack’ against a civilian population. Only in the latter case can these crimes be prosecuted by the international community. One of the most influential accounts of this idea is Larry May’s International Harm Principle, which states that crimes against humanity are those that somehow ‘harm humanity.’ I argue that this principle is unable to provide an adequate account of crimes against humanity. Moreover, I argue that the principle fails to account for the idea that crimes against humanity are necessarily group based. I conclude by suggesting that the problem with May’s account is that it relies on a harm-based conception of crime which is very popular, but ultimately mistaken. I submit that in order to develop an adequate theory of crimes against humanity we need to abandon the harm-based model and replace it with an alternative conception of crime and criminal law, one based on the notion of accountability.     

Intervening in gun markets: an experiment to assess the impact of targeted gun-law messaging

The objective of this study was to assess whether targeting new gun buyers with a public safety message aimed at improving gun law awareness can modify gun purchasers’ behaviors. Between May 2007 and September 2008, 2,120 guns were purchased in two target neighborhoods of the City of Los Angeles. Starting in August 2007, gun buyers initiating transactions on odd-numbered days received a letter signed by prominent law enforcement officials, indicating that law enforcement had a record of their gun purchase and that the gun buyer should properly record future transfers of the gun. The letters arrived during buyers’ 10-day waiting periods, before they could legally return to the store to collect their new gun. Subsequent gun records were extracted to assess the letter’s effect on legal secondary sales, reports of stolen guns, and recovery of the gun in a crime. An intent-to-treat analysis was also conducted as a sensitivity check to remedy a lapse in the letter program between May and August 2007. The letter appears to have no effect on the legal transfer rate or on the short-term rate of guns subsequently turning up in a crime. However, we found that the rate at which guns are reported stolen for those who received the letter is more than twice the rate for those who did not receive the letter (p value = 0.01). Those receiving the letter reported their gun stolen at a rate of 18 guns per 1,000 gun-years and those not receiving the letter reported their gun stolen at a rate of 7 guns per 1,000 gun-years. Of those receiving the letter, 1.9% reported their gun stolen during the study period compared to 1.0% for those who did not receive the letter. The percentage of guns reported stolen in these neighborhoods is high, indicating a high rate of true gun theft, a regular practice of using stolen-gun reports to separate the gun buyer from future misuse of the gun, or some blend of both. Simple, targeted gun law awareness campaigns can modify new gun buyers’ behaviors. Additional follow-up or modifications to this initiative might be needed to impact the rate at which guns enter the illegal gun market and ultimately are recovered in crimes.     

The Hate Crime Canon and Beyond: A Critical Assessment

Although it remains an empirical question whether the U.S. is experiencing greater levels of hate-motivated-conduct than in the past, it is beyond dispute that the concept of ‘hate crime’ has been institutionalized in social, political, and legal discourse in the U.S. From the introduction and politicization of the term hate crime in the late 1970s to the continued enforcement of hate crime law at the beginning of the twenty-first century, social movements have constructed the problem of bias-motivated violence in particular ways, while politicians at both the federal and state level have made legislation that defines the parameters of hate crime. Accordingly, this article identifies and examines the parameters of a hate crime canon in the U.S., which can first and foremost be described as a body of law that 1) provides anew state policy action, by either creating anew criminal category, altering an existing law, or enhancing penalties for select extant crimes when they are committed for bias reasons; 2) contains an intent standard, which refers to the subjective intention of the perpetrator rather than relying solely on the basis of objective behavior; and 3) specifies a list of protected social statuses, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disabilities, etc. Arguing that these features constitute the core parameters of the hate crime canon and attendant discourse in the U.S., this article offers a critical assessment of the emergence, institutionalization, and arguable consequences of ‘hate crime’ as a recently developed social fact - in the Durkheimian sense of the word - that is consequential for the politics of victimization in the modern era and the social control of violence against minorities more particularly. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.