Temporal dimensions of vulnerability to crime in economic sectors

This paper presents the results of research into vulnerability to crime in two economic sectors in Belgium. Vulnerability to crime is an integration of diverse temporal factors. We address pre-crime and post-crime aspects of vulnerability, arising before and after the criminal event in an economic context. Based on interviews with professionals, security staff, law enforcement agents and with criminals in the transport sector and the hotel and catering industry, a study of police files, and inspired by ecologists’ work on resilience, we explore vulnerability to crime as a multifaceted factor undermining the sustainability of businesses

Intelligence tradecraft and the pre-crime approach to EU internal security governance

EU internal security policy has been in recent years progressively focused onprevention of threats and risks. The 2010 Internal Security Strategy for the EUhighlighted the need for prevention and anticipation conceived as a proactiveintelligence-led approach to EU internal security. A pre-crime framework has beenwidely applied in fields like security studies, police science, criminology, ethics,political sociology and political geography, owing to its inherent explanatorypower. The core element of pre-crime approach is the selection and identificationof the most probable among abstract risks and dispersed threats, and the profiling,or sorting out, of particular social groups or individuals posing presumablyimminent threats. This paper aims at inserting the concept of intelligencetradecraft into the pre-crime analytical framework and verify the usefulness of such an approach to the study of EU internal security governance. The paper will focus on ‘intelligence process’ and ‘intelligence product’, i.e. how the stakeholders of EU internal security policy construct, modify and develop ‘products’ allowing for a better risk management and threat assessment in thecontext of precautionary and anticipatory attitudes towards EU securitygovernance

The death of Jill Meagher: crime and punishment on social media

This paper aims to identify and analyse several predominant issues and discourses as they relate to the burgeoning interrelationship between social media, crime and victim. Abstract In this paper we analyse the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jill Meagher as a case study to highlight a range of issues that emerge in relation to criminalisation, crime prevention and policing strategies on social media - issues that, in our opinion, require immediate and thorough theoretical engagement. An in-depth analysis of Jill Meagher’s case and its newsworthiness in terrestrial media is a challenging task that is beyond the scope of this paper; rather, the focus for this particular paper is on the process of agenda-building, particularly via social media, and the impact of the social environment and the capacity of ‘ordinary’ citizens to influence the agenda-defining process. In addition, we outline other issues that emerged in the aftermath of this case, such as the depth of the target audience on social media, the threat of a ‘trial by social media’ and the place of social media in the context of pre-crime and surveillance debates. Through the analysis of research data we establish some preliminary findings and call for more audacious and critical engagement by criminologists and social scientists in addressing the challenges posed by new technologies

Fighting terror with law? Some other genealogies of pre-emption

Within criminology and criminal law the reception of post-9/11 counter-terrorist law has generally been critical, if not hostile. The undeniable proliferation of preventive statutes has been regarded as incompatible with conventional liberal norms and as dangerously innovative in its embrace of new strategies of control. But is such law innovative, and does it threaten to leach into other areas of criminal law, as some have feared? Exploring three governmental innovations – mental health law, habitual criminal controls, and civilian internment in war-time – that developed as expressions of the liberal state’s desire to ensure the safety of its citizens in times of peace and war, the authors argue that a more historically grounded understanding of the governmental and geopolitical contexts of security provides a surer foundation on which to construct the frameworks of interpretation of contemporary counter-terrorism law

Big Data\u27s Other Privacy Problem

Big Data has not one privacy problem, but two. We are accustomed to talking about surveillance of data subjects. But Big Data also enables disconcertingly close surveillance of its users. The questions we ask of Big Data can be intensely revealing, but, paradoxically, protecting subjects\u27 privacy can require spying on users. Big Data is an ideology of technology, used to justify the centralization of information and power in data barons, pushing both subjects and users into a kind of feudal subordination. This short and polemical essay uses the Bloomberg Terminal scandal as a window to illuminate Big Data\u27s other privacy problem

Techno-surveillance of the roads: High impact and low interest

Copyright © 2010 Palgrave Macmillan. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Crime Prevention and Community Safety. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Crime Prevention and Community Safety 10(1): 1-18 is available online at the link below.Road crashes and road crime are huge international problems produced by global society’s increasing dependence on motorised transport. To help reduce these crash and crime statistics, roads technology is rapidly developing to prevent the former and deter the latter. This technology largely works by vehicle surveillance, and as with surveillance technology used in other arenas of crime prevention, drawbacks and dangers go along with the safety and security enhancing aspects. This paper reviews some key emerging roads technologies, the theoretical concerns raised by them and how, through various theoretical frameworks, they could be explored by the discipline of criminology. It urges that the surveillance aspects of road crime prevention and the study of vehicle-related crime more generally would benefit from criminological consideration and be theoretically rewarding. Moreover, in view of the centrality of the roads in contemporary life and the extent of global harm caused there, it contends that criminology should engage with this terrain

Striving for autonomy : representative female characters in the detective novels of P. D. James : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Representative female characters from several of P D James's detective novels are used to exemplify the changes in women's position in society during the four decades (from the early 1960s to the late 1990s) which span James's publishing career and which coincide with the period known as the second wave of feminism. Women characters have always taken a prominent place in P D James's detective fiction, and since the 1970s her books have increasingly foregrounded the problems that women have when working in male-dominated professions, revealing their increasing autonomy but also disclosing the continuing limitations of that autonomy. Her novels are acknowledged as becoming increasingly literary. In her early novels James followed the formula of the classic detective fiction genre quite closely. During the 1970s she experimented with novels that on the surface read as detective novels, while functioning subtextually in relation to myths and metaphors. In her most recent works she transcends the genre, using the detective formula simply as a framework for her novels of literary realism