Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security

Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions

Place-Based Simulation Modeling: Agent-Based Modeling and Virtual Environments

Since the earliest geographical explorations of criminal phenomena, scientists have come to the realization that crime occurrences can often be best explained by analysis at local scales. For example, the works of Guerry and Quetelet—which are often credited as being the first spatial studies of crime—analyzed data that had been aggregated to regions approximately similar to US states. The next major seminal work on spatial crime patterns was from the Chicago School in the 20th century and increased the spatial resolution of analysis to the census tract (an American administrative area that is designed to contain approximately 4,000 individual inhabitants). With the availability of higher-quality spatial data, as well as improvements in the computing infrastructure (particularly with respect to spatial analysis and mapping), more recent empirical spatial criminology work can operate at even higher resolutions; the “crime at places” literature regularly highlights the importance of analyzing crime at the street segment or at even finer scales. These empirical realizations—that crime patterns vary substantially at micro places—are well grounded in the core environmental criminology theories of routine activity theory, the geometric theory of crime, and the rational choice perspective. Each theory focuses on the individual-level nature of crime, the behavior and motivations of individual people, and the importance of the immediate surroundings. For example, routine activities theory stipulates that a crime is possible when an offender and a potential victim meet at the same time and place in the absence of a capable guardian. The geometric theory of crime suggests that individuals build up an awareness of their surroundings as they undertake their routine activities, and it is where these areas overlap with crime opportunities that crimes are most likely to occur. Finally, the rational choice perspective suggests that the decision to commit a crime is partially a cost-benefit analysis of the risks and rewards. To properly understand or model these three decisions it is important to capture the motivations, awareness, rationality, immediate surroundings, etc., of the individual and include a highly disaggregate representation of space (i.e. “micro-places”). Unfortunately one of the most common methods for modeling crime, regression, is somewhat poorly suited capturing these dynamics. As with most traditional modeling approaches, regression models represent the underlying system through mathematical aggregations. The resulting models are therefore well suited to systems that behave in a linear fashion (e.g., where a change in model input leads to a predictable change in the model output) and where low-level heterogeneity is not important (i.e., we can assume that everyone in a particular group of people will behave in the same way). However, as alluded to earlier, the crime system does not necessarily meet these assumptions. To really understand the dynamics of crime patterns, and to be able to properly represent the underlying theories, it is necessary to represent the behavior of the individual system components (i.e. people) directly. For this reason, many scientists from a variety of different disciplines are turning to individual-level modeling techniques such as agent-based modeling

A Model Officer: An Agent-based Model of Policing

Crime is a complex phenomenon, emerging from the interactions of offenders, victims, and their environment, and in particular from the presence or absence of capable guardians. Researchers have historically struggled to understand how police officers create guardianship. This presents a challenge because, in order to understand how to advise the police, researchers must have an understanding of how the current system works. The work presents an agent-based model that simulates the movement of police vehicles, using a record of real calls for service and real levels of police staffing in spatially explicit environments to emulate the demands on the police force. The GPS traces of the simulated officers are compared with real officer movement GPS data in order to assess the quality of the generated movement patterns. The model represents an improvement on existing standards of police simulation, and points the way toward more nuanced understandings of how police officers influence the criminological environment

Who owns desistance? A triad of agency enabling social structures in the desistance process

Theories of desistance assert agency is a prerequisite to the process which can be enabled or curtailed by social structures. We present data from six community hub sites that hosted probation services in the UK in 2019. While our analysis identifies agency enabling institutional and relational structures across the different hub governance sub-types in our sample, these were clearest in hubs run in the community by the community. This article contributes a triad of core enabling social structures that operate at the intersection between agency and structure in the desistance process. The significance of our findings is that the ownership question is key to the expedition of enabling social structures

Desistance: Envisioning Futures

This chapter provides an overview of desistance scholarship, surveying some of the major theoretical and empirical explanations of how and why people stop offending, and exploring the implications of this body of work for criminal justice. Traditionally, criminology has been focused on the study of crime and in particular on the causes of crime, as well as criminal justice responses to it. By comparison, examining how and why people stop and refrain from offending, and considering which criminal justice responses might support or frustrate such processes has a much shorter history. We would argue that it is also an area of study which, despite being in some senses bound by its focus on crime and offending, nonetheless transcends more orthodox criminological concerns and ultimately compels those who study it to engage with more fundamental questions of political philosophy (as well as with other disciplinary perspectives). We want to argue therefore that desistance research is (or at least can be) a form of ‘alternative criminology’ both in the way it frames its objects of inquiry and in the ways it pushes it towards disciplinary borders and intersections

To kill and to die: On the joys and sorrows of juvenile drug dealers in Bahia, Brazil

This article discusses the life and death of juvenile drug dealers in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where the drug business has become omnipresent and a growing number of youths from the urban periphery are taking up a career with one of the country’s many drug gangs. The price most of them pay for their economic success as traffickers is high: they are repeatedly imprisoned under harsh conditions, suffer severe physical violence and, at times, die at young age. Drawing on the narratives of juveniles from Bahia and the writings of Bataille and Baudrillard, the youths’ approach to life is discussed as a knowingly illusory attempt to regain their sovereignty within the boundaries of consumer capitalism. It is argued that their death is not a blow of fate, but rather the premeditated consequence of their acquisition of consumer-citizenship ‘on credit’ and, ultimately, their refusal to constitute Brazil’s modern precariat.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The archipelago of intervention: governing the awkward citizen

This doctoral thesis examines the changing ways in which the neoliberal state looks to engage with populations of marginalised, excluded and ‘awkward citizens’. Whilst some have argued that the neoliberal state has abandoned and/or adopted a punitive and revanchist stance towards ‘awkward citizens’, this thesis demonstrates that an ‘archipelago of intervention’ has developed which is dirigiste in nature and represents a manifold of assistive and regressive techniques of government. Targeting individuals defined as ‘problematic’ (those with ‘chaotic lifestyles’: substance misuse issues, offending behaviour, vulnerably housed males) the archipelago of intervention represents a spatially expansive, ideationally disparate and operationally intense project of marginal social welfare. In order to more closely analyse these evolving practices of intervention, three case studies are examined through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality: one-to-one case working aimed at those with chaotic lifestyles; two ‘Supported Accommodation’ projects for vulnerably housed males; and the ‘Unpaid Work’/Community Payback order delivered by the Probation Service. Using interviews with service users, staff and managers combined with ethnographies undertaken in Supported Accommodation projects and Visible Unpaid Work sites, the thesis demonstrates how these interventions share a commitment to working with individuals through consent rather than coercion. Located at the cutting edge of ‘roll out’ neoliberal social policy, the thesis shows how these techniques of government operate to reform the subjectivities of their target population through the application of ‘psy’ techniques, contractual governance, embodied discipline and re-worked ideas about the rehabilitation of offenders. Drawing on Lefebvre, space and time emerge as central problematics in attempts to govern awkward citizens. Each case study intervention is shown to carve out re-worked spatio-temporalities which are held to be generative of behavioural and attitudinal reform. Thus, the thesis makes an important contribution to debates on the unfolding neoliberalisation of the state and social policy by pointing to the complex assemblages of power and multiple practices through which the state governs problematic populations. Moreover, the PhD also contributes to theoretical debates around the idea of ‘governmentality’ by arguing for a geographically sensitive and materially open approach to systems of governance

Estimating the spatial distribution of crime events around a football stadium from georeferenced tweets

Crowd-based events, such as football matches, are considered generators of crime. Criminological research on the influence of football matches has consistently uncovered differences in spatial crime patterns, particularly in the areas around stadia. At the same time, social media data mining research on football matches shows a high volume of data created during football events. This study seeks to build on these two research streams by exploring the spatial relationship between crime events and nearby Twitter activity around a football stadium, and estimating the possible influence of tweets for explaining the presence or absence of crime in the area around a football stadium on match days. Aggregated hourly crime data and geotagged tweets for the same area around the stadium are analysed using exploratory and inferential methods. Spatial clustering, spatial statistics, text mining as well as a hurdle negative binomial logistic regression for spatiotemporal explanations are utilized in our analysis. Findings indicate a statistically significant spatial relationship between three crime types (criminal damage, theft and handling, and violence against the person) and tweet patterns, and that such a relationship can be used to explain future incidents of crime