Organised Cybercrime or Cybercrime that is Organised? An Assessment of the Conceptualisation of Financial Cybercrime as Organised Crime

Criminological research over the last couple of decades has improved our understanding of cybercrimes. However, this body of research is regarded as still theoretically thin and not fully developed; more knowledge on the actors involved, their characteristics, and modus operandi is needed. Some publications recently suggested that organised crime is or might be involved in cybercrimes, which would have important policing implications, but evidence-based research on this point is still scarce and inconclusive. This article seeks to further this path of inquiry by providing a systematic analysis of 40 cases from The Netherlands, Germany, UK, and USA where criminal networks were involved in financial cybercrimes affecting the banking sector. It also assesses whether and to what extent these criminal networks meet the definitions of organised crime and discusses the theoretical and policing implications of our findings.     

Evaluating the relative impact of positive and negative encounters with police: a randomized experiment

Objectives

Examines the influence of positive, negative, and neutral police behavior during traffic stops on citizen perceptions of police.

Methods

Participants were randomly assigned to view a video clip of a simulated traffic stop in which the officer communicates with the driver in a positive (procedurally just), negative (procedurally unjust), or neutral manner. After viewing the video, participants completed a survey about their perceptions of police, including their level of trust in police, obligation to obey police orders, and willingness to cooperate with police.

Results

Observing positive interactions with police enhanced people’s self-reported willingness to cooperate with police, obligation to obey police and the law, and trust and confidence in police, whereas observing negative interactions undermined these outcomes. The effects of these interactions were much stronger for encounter-specific outcomes than for more general outcomes.

Conclusions

The results from this randomized experiment confirm that procedural justice can enhance people’s prosocial attitudes toward police, whereas procedural injustice can undermine these attitudes. While positive (procedurally just) interactions tend to have weaker effects than negative (procedurally unjust) interactions, this study finds little support for the notion that only negative experiences shape people’s views about the police.

     

Mental Health Services for Incarcerated Youth: Report from a Statewide Survey

The need for mental health care has been steadily increasing for youth coming into contact with the juvenile probation system. This paper presents the results of a statewide survey of juvenile probation departments and associated mental health, health care, court, and education personnel in California. The intent of the survey was to better understand the costs and associated contexts of caring for youth with suspected mental disorders in juvenile detention facilities. The burden of caring for these youth on detention facilities and their staffs is substantial. Implications for courts, policy planning, training, and further research are discussed.     

Detecting illegal activities: the case of cartels

This paper considers enhancements of a comparatively new method to detect cartels, the System of Cartel Markers (SCM), introduced by Blanckenburg and Geist (Int Adv Econ Res 15(4):421–436, 2009). The aim of SCM is to find illegal collusion on legal markets with observable market data. It uses expected behavior patterns such as low level of capacity utilization, slackness of price adjustments to exogenous shocks, excess rates of return, nearly constant capacities, less price changes and lower variance of capacity growth rate. However, the testing of cost efficiency is lacking so far. Following Leibenstein’s (Am Econ Rev 56:392–415, 1966) X-inefficiency theory, we assume that cartel members face lower competition and hence, tend to be less cost efficient. Therefore, we enhance SCM and use cost efficiency as a further marker in order to detect cartels. We apply SCM to the German cement cartel and find empirical support for some markers. The proposed methodology may be used for antitrust screening and regulatory purposes.     

Native American Identity and the Limits of Cultural Defence

This article concerns itself with the phenomenon of the cultural defence as it exhibits itself in the US juridical context. Recent socio-legal discussions about this phenomenon reveal three prevalent positions: the illegality of cultural defence on constitutional grounds, the necessity of cultural defence as a matter of discretionary justice, and the intermediary position of working cultural defence into a legal doctrine. By problematizing the operative concept of culture, the author suggests that the idea of cultural defence should be understood in terms of foreignness. This suggestion is supported on the basis of the phenomenological theory of the alien (xenology). In order to illustrate the juridical limits of the cultural defence I examine the history of constructing the Native American as a cultural legal subject. Hence the question that primes this examination: is there a possibility of the traditional cultural defence for the American Indians? After a provisional answer that there is no such possibility, I conclude with the discussion of hospitality as a way to an ethically necessary and legally acceptable idea of culture.     

Developing and Validating a New Classroom Climate Observation Assessment Tool

The climate of school classrooms, shaped by a combination of teacher practices and peer processes, is an important determinant for children's psychosocial functioning and is a primary factor affecting bullying and victimization. Given that there are relatively few theoretically-grounded and validated assessment tools designed to measure the social climate of classrooms, our research team developed an observation tool through participatory action research (PAR). This article details how the assessment tool was designed and preliminarily validated in 18 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms in a large urban public school district. The goals of this study are to illustrate the feasibility of a PAR paradigm in measurement development, ascertain the psychometric properties of the assessment tool, and determine associations with different indices of classroom levels of relational and physical aggression.     

Counterterror intelligence operations and terror attacks

We present a formal model of an intelligence agency that must divide its resources between the collection and analysis of information pertaining to terror plots. The model highlights the negative consequences of queues which form when collection exceeds analytic capacity. We incorporate the response of a terrorist organization to the operating characteristics of the intelligence system it faces, and solve for equilibrium strategies for the intelligence system and terrorist organization. Our results demonstrate the importance of properly balancing resources between collection and analysis, and stand in contrast to the observed state of overcollection in US intelligence agencies.