Litter, gender and brand: The anticipation of incivilities and perceptions of crime prevalence

This paper isolates litter as a physical incivility in a film-based experiment, demonstrating the impact of litter on participants' anticipation of a wide range of both physical and social incivilities, and on their perceptions of crime prevalence. Such relationships have not previously been examined, partly because litter has rarely been the focus of earlier studies on incivilities. This paper also tests for possible interaction effects in these relationships involving gender (finding no significant interaction), as well as examining whether there is a difference in the anticipation of incivilities and perceptions of crime prevalence between participants exposed to branded as opposed to unbranded litter (finding no difference between the two groups). Litter is often viewed as a tolerable nuisance and not always treated as a priority. This study suggests prioritising funds towards more targeted interventions to reduce litter might result in some ‘quick wins’ – most notably, reducing perceptions of crime prevalenc

Combatting and analysing organized crime: the view from witnesses

© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. This special issue of Trends in Organized Crime begins with a tribute to Joseph Albini who died in 2013 written by his colleague Jeff McIllwain and ends with Matthew G. Yeager’s reexamination of the career of John Landesco, among the earliest pioneers in the study of organized crime. In between are interviews with eight people whose careers gave them unique insights into the workings of organized criminality and allowed them to witness the creation of organized crime control efforts in America, Europe and at international levels as well as the implementation of these efforts. Dwight Smith, Frederick Martens, Selwyn Raab, James Jacobs, Cyrille Fijnaut, Ernesto Savona, Petrus van Duyne and Alan Wright were asked questions about their career experiences and the evolution of their thinking on organized crime and organized crime control. We normally find out about historical processes second hand through sources that are often unreliable and suspect. The testimonies and analyses in this volume sometimes clash with each other but more often complement each other. Taken together they are all first-hand accounts of the creation and workings of organized crime control, written by people who have dedicated much of their working lives to the effort to researching, understanding and combatting organized crime