Community experiences of organised crime in Scotland

The research explored community experiences of serious organised crime in Scotland (SOC). The report provides information on the nature and extent of the impact of SOC on everyday life in the community, as well as offering suggestions for policy development. The study sought to answer the following questions: 1)What are the relationships that exist between SOC and communities in Scotland? 2)What are the experiences and perceptions of residents, stakeholders and organisations of the scope and nature of SOC within their local area? and 3)How does SOC impact on community wellbeing, and to what extent can the harms associated with SOC be mitigated

New crimes – new tactics: the emergence and effectiveness of disruption in tackling serious organised crime

Whilst the encouragement to use disruption techniques in tackling organised crime has emerged in government and law enforcment rhetoric, little is known about its importance. This study examines how two UK police forces use a disruption approach to target 100 organised crime suspects. The findings show that a disruption approach offers a more dynamic and flexible approach, when compared with traditional prosecution and is popular with practitioners. However further research is needed to understand the most effective method of delivery and the level of impact the approach can bring

Exploring internal child sex trafficking networks using social network analysis

This article explores the potential of social network analysis as a tool in supporting the investigation of internal child sex trafficking in the UK. In doing so, it uses only data, software, and training already available to UK police. Data from two major operations are analysed using in-built centrality metrics, designed to measure a network’s overarching structural properties and identify particularly powerful individuals. This work addresses victim networks alongside offender networks. The insights generated by SNA inform ideas for targeted interventions based on the principles of Situational Crime Prevention. These harm-reduction initiatives go beyond traditional enforcement to cover prevention, disruption, prosecution, etc. This article ends by discussing how SNA can be applied and further developed by frontline policing, strategic policing, prosecution, and policy and research

What’s Sex (Composition) Got to Do with It? The Importance of Sex Composition of Gangs for Female and Male Members’ Offending and Victimization

Sex composition of groups has been theorized in organizational sociology and found in prior work to structure female and male members’ behaviors and experiences. Peer group and gang literature similarly finds that the sex gap in offending varies across groups of differing sex ratios. Drawing on this and other research linking gang membership, offending, and victimization, we examine whether sex composition of gangs is linked to sex differences in offending in this sample, further assess whether sex composition similarly structures females’ and males’ victimization experiences, and if so, why. Self-report data from gang members in a multi-site, longitudinal study of 3,820 youths are employed. Results support previous findings about variations in member delinquency by both sex and sex composition of the gang and also indicate parallel variations in members’ victimization. These results are further considered within the context of facilitating effects such as gender dynamics, gang characteristics, and normative orientation

What’s Sex (Composition) Got to Do with It? The Importance of Sex Composition of Gangs for Female and Male Members’ Offending and Victimization

Sex composition of groups has been theorized in organizational sociology and found in prior work to structure female and male members’ behaviors and experiences. Peer group and gang literature similarly finds that the sex gap in offending varies across groups of differing sex ratios. Drawing on this and other research linking gang membership, offending, and victimization, we examine whether sex composition of gangs is linked to sex differences in offending in this sample, further assess whether sex composition similarly structures females’ and males’ victimization experiences, and if so, why. Self-report data from gang members in a multi-site, longitudinal study of 3,820 youths are employed. Results support previous findings about variations in member delinquency by both sex and sex composition of the gang and also indicate parallel variations in members’ victimization. These results are further considered within the context of facilitating effects such as gender dynamics, gang characteristics, and normative orientation

Criminal Group Dynamics and Network Methods

Value – Network methods provide a means to revisit and extend theories of crime and delinquency with a focus on social structure. The unique affinity between group dynamics and network methods highlights immense opportunities for expanding the knowledge of collective trajectories

One Gang Dies, Another Gains? The Network Dynamics of Criminal Group Persistence

What leads a minority of criminal groups to persist over time? Although most criminal groups are characterized by short life spans, a subset manages to survive extended periods. Contemporary research on criminal groups has been primarily descriptive and static, leaving important questions on the correlates of group persistence unanswered. By drawing from competing perspectives on the relationship between cohesion and group persistence, we apply a longitudinal approach to examine the network dynamics influencing the life span of criminal groups. We use 9 years of official data on the criminal and social networks of gang associates in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to delineate criminal group boundaries and examine variation in group duration. Our statistical approach simultaneously considers within‐ and between‐group attributes to isolate how groups’ cohesion, as well as their embeddedness in the wider gang structure, impacts survival. Our results show that group survival is a function of their cohesion and embeddedness. Yet, the relationship is not direct but moderated by group size. Whereas large groups that adopt closed structures are more likely to persist, small groups’ survival depends on less cohesive and more versatile structures. In the discussion, we consider the impact of these findings for the continued understanding of group trajectories

Shots fired: Unraveling the 2015 Surrey gang conflict using social network analysis

The ever-changing gang landscape in British Columbia (BC) has seen periods of escalated retaliatory gang violence, most recently in 2015, in Surrey, BC, Canada. The ‘face’ of the gang problem in Surrey is that of South Asian males in their early twenties. Homicide among this population is an unrecognized public health crisis, as over the last decade, there have been over 150 deaths and counting of South Asian males related to gang violence in the Lower Mainland. A cross-disciplinary tool that police can use to advance their understanding of gangs, conflicts and violent victimization is social network analysis (SNA). The ego-networks of the 23 confirmed gang-related gun homicide or attempted homicide victims in Surrey, in 2015, are constructed using police data from 2011 to 2015. The present study a) assesses the overall structure to understand the Surrey gang conflict, b) conducts centrality analyses to identify those individuals (victims and non-victims) at the highest risk of gunshot victimization and c) explores the potential consequences of being central in the victim network. Results indicate that 299 of the 355 individuals in the overall network are connected to each other, including 18 of the 23 victims, who are more likely to be brokers. A high-risk group is identified, with two or more direct connections to victims that are at the highest risk of victimization. Finally, results show that 2016 and 2017 victims are among the most central in the network. Policy and practical implications are discussed with reference to these findings