A virtuous combination of structural and skill analysis to defeat organized crime

The paper proposes the implementation of new and more effective policies to contrast organized crime. In particular, it develops a simple algorithm to estimate the resilience of criminal networks and to compare the effects of different attack strategies used by police forces. Obtained results show the high resilience ability of criminal organizations, suggesting a virtuous combination of structural and skill analysis. Moreover, the paper suggests public policies and legal instruments to discourage and fight all kinds of mafia contiguity currently pursued with toothless weapons

Local Community Participation in Rhino Conservation - Key to Conservation Success

A robust framework to guide community engagement in sustainable wildlife conservation and illegal wildlife trade is lacking. Virtually all conservation bodies and players believe that local communities are key to the success of rhino conservation but they are not equally walking their talk. Bottom-up community-based initiatives help to curb poaching especially level one poachers. The multifaceted problem of the African rhinoceros poaching on the continent is approaching calamitous proportions, with astounding, sobering statistics revealing the sheer extent of the illegal practice today. Poverty, greediness, superstition, rampant corruption, unchecked social injustice, ruthlessness, and ignorance are fuelling the interplay of rhino horn demand and supply. In order to save the remaining rhinoceros species there is need for economic transformation which will benefit both the communities and wildlife. Communities should get direct financial benefits from rhinoceros conservation, capacitate them and always engage them in rhinoceros conservation matters. Rhino protection should be incentivized, increasing the number of local people benefiting from conservation, and decreasing hostility towards wildlife will motivate local people to fully embrace conservation efforts. These conservation efforts should first target level one poachers who are vulnerable and exposed, by developing a comprehensive profitable and lucrative community participation packages in all rhino properties. Conservationists should walk their talk and genuinely work with local communities to build support for rhino conservation through education, awareness, self-sustaining business ventures and employment

Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference

The 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime

Disrupting resilient criminal networks through data analysis: The case of sicilian mafia

Compared to other types of social networks, criminal networks present particularly hard challenges, due to their strong resilience to disruption, which poses severe hurdles to LawEnforcement Agencies (LEAs). Herein, we borrow methods and tools from Social Network Analysis (SNA) to (i) unveil the structure and organization of Sicilian Mafia gangs, based on two real-world datasets, and (ii) gain insights as to how to efficiently reduce the Largest Connected Component (LCC) of two networks derived from them. Mafia networks have peculiar features in terms of the links distribution and strength, which makes them very different from other social networks, and extremely robust to exogenous perturbations. Analysts also face difficulties in collecting reliable datasets that accurately describe the gangs' internal structure and their relationships with the external world, which is why earlier studies are largely qualitative, elusive and incomplete. An added value of our work is the generation of two realworld datasets, based on raw data extracted from juridical acts, relating to a Mafia organization that operated in Sicily during the first decade of 2000s. We created two different networks, capturing phone calls and physical meetings, respectively. Our analysis simulated different intervention procedures: (i) arresting one criminal at a time (sequential node removal); and (ii) police raids (node block removal). In both the sequential, and the node block removal intervention procedures, the Betweenness centrality was the most effective strategy in prioritizing the nodes to be removed. For instance, when targeting the top 5% nodes with the largest Betweenness centrality, our simulations suggest a reduction of up to 70% in the size of the LCC. We also identified that, due the peculiar type of interactions in criminal networks (namely, the distribution of the interactions' frequency), no significant differences exist between weighted and unweighted network analysis. Our work has significant practical applications for perturbing the operations of criminal and terrorist networks

THE RESILIENCE OF CRIMINAL NETWORKS: AN AGENT-BASED SIMULATION ASSESSING DRUG TRAFFICKING ORGANIZATIONS REACTIONS TO LAW ENFORCEMENT ATTEMPTS AT DISRUPTION

Le organizzazioni criminali operano in ambienti mutevoli e complessi. Flessibilità e dinamicità consentono loro di sfruttare nuove opportunità illecite e di reagire alle azioni di contrasto delle forze dell'ordine (FdO). Molti studi sulla resilienza delle reti criminali esaminano le strutture organizzative dei gruppi a seguito dell’arresto di alcuni membri, ma spesso trascurano le strategie di adattamento dei gruppi. Lo studio ha analizzato la resilienza delle organizzazioni attive nel traffico e spaccio di stupefacenti, concentrandosi su tre aspetti: la capacità di non soccombere, di reagire in maniera rapida ed efficace e di mantenere inalterate le funzioni primarie dell’organizzazione. Lo sviluppo di un modello ad agenti basato sui contenuti di un’ordinanza per l’applicazione di misure cautelari per i membri di un’organizzazione camorristica coinvolta nel traffico di stupefacenti e sulla letteratura criminologica esistente ha permesso la simulazione delle attività di traffico e spaccio da parte di organizzazioni criminali e le relative reazioni alle azioni di contrasto delle FdO. I risultati identificano le azioni di contrasto delle FdO come eventi critici per la sopravvivenza delle organizzazioni criminali. Tuttavia, le organizzazioni rimaste attive mostrano un’alta resilienza, con efficaci reazioni agli eventi di contrasto al fine di continuare le attività di traffico e spaccio.Criminal organizations operate in complex changing environments. Being flexible and dynamic allows criminal networks not only to exploit new illicit opportunities but also to react to law enforcement attempts at disruption, enhancing the persistence of these networks over time. Most studies investigating network disruption have examined organizational structures before and after the arrests of some actors but have disregarded groups’ adaptation strategies. The present study investigated the resilience of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) to law enforcement attempts at disruption, focusing on three main aspects: the ability to endure disruption, react quickly and efficiently to threats, and keep primary functions unaltered. The analysis relied on an agent-based model (ABM) that simulates drug trafficking and dealing activities by organized criminal groups and their reactions to law enforcement attempts at disruption. The simulation relied on information retrieved from a detailed court order against a large-scale Italian DTO and from the literature. The results demonstrated that law enforcement interventions are often critical events for DTOs, with high rates of disruption. However, surviving DTOs always displayed a high level of resilience, with effective strategies in place to react to threatening events and to continue drug trafficking and dealing

The Terror Network Industrial Complex: A Measurement and Analysis of Terrorist Networks and War Stocks

This paper presents a measurement study and analysis of the structure of multiple Islamic terrorist networks to determine if similar characteristics exist between those networks. We examine data gathered from four terrorist groups: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) consisting of six terror networks. Our study contains 471 terrorists’ nodes and 2078 links. Each terror network is compared in terms efficiency, communication and composition of network metrics. The paper examines the effects these terrorist attacks had on US aerospace and defence stocks (herein War stocks). We found that the Islamic terror groups increase recruitment during the planned attacks, communication increases during and after the attacks between the subordinate terrorists and low density is a common feature of Islamic terrorist groups. The Al- Qaeda organisation structure was the most complex and superior in terms of secrecy, diameter, clustering, modularity and density. Jemaah Islamiyah followed a similar structure but not as superior. The ISIS and LeT organisational structures were more concerned with the efficiency of the operation rather than secrecy. We found that war stocks prices and the S+P 500 were lower the day after the attacks, however, the war stocks slightly outperformed the S+P 500 the day after the attacks. Further, we found that war stock prices were significantly lower one month after the terrorist attacks but the S+P 500 rebounded one month later

Mathematics

The inherent complexity of criminal behaviour means that it is not a topic to which the field of mathematics has traditionally been thought to apply. In recent years, however, the study of crime has mirrored that of several other social phenomena in attracting increased attention from within the mathematical community. As well as being facilitated by a dramatic revolution in data availability, this has largely been driven by the growth of mathematical tools designed to confront the challenges presented by such systems; an approach encapsulated by the term ‘complexity science’. This chapter outlines the ways in which mathematical approaches can contribute to the understanding of crime, with particular emphasis on the role of modelling in offering insight into the mechanisms underlying criminal phenomena. A number of mathematical approaches are reviewed in this context, including dynamical systems theory, network science and game theory. Following this, previous research of this type on a number of criminological topics is reviewed, before the chapter concludes by considering the outlook for work in this area and some key issues which remain to be resolved

Transnational organized environmental crime

Based on three case studies of transnational organized environmental crime, this chapter, on the one hand, aims to illustrate some direct and indirect harm caused by environmental black markets. On the other hand, it aims to critically assess the often artificial distinction between organized and corporate crime in environmental crimes. Since the 1990s, so-called green criminologists have critically studied the environment in the broadest sense of the word, focusing on various forms of environmental harm, crime and regulation, often drawing parallels between ecological and socioeconomic or political inequalities. Waste crime is the trade, treatment or disposal of waste in ways that breach international or domestic environmental legislation and cause harm or risk to the environment and human health. Wildlife crime is one of the areas that have long been recognized as a key environmental crisis. Many species, both big and small, are on the brink of extinction or have gone extinct because of trade and poaching

Dismantling the poachernomics of the illegal wildlife trade

Persistent poaching fuelled by demand for elephant ivory and rhino horn continues to threaten these species. Despite international trade restrictions operating since the 1970s, limiting poaching has remained a substantial challenge over the last decade. The poaching economy of such storable goods is driven by a combination of persistent consumer demand and market speculation, and enabled by weak governance, lack of adequate resources for species protection, and alienation of local people who pay the costs of living alongside these species. We argue that restricting the legal supply of such wildlife products has created ideal conditions for the poaching economy - `poachernomics' - to thrive. Strategies that move toward empowering local communities with stronger property rights over wildlife and delivering more benefits to them, including via carefully regulated legal trade, are underused elements in the current fight against the onslaught of the international illegal wildlife trade.Peer reviewe