Gazette - Latest research in law enforcement

ON THE LEADING EDGE

The following are excerpts from recent research related to justice and law enforcement. To access the full reports, please visit the website links at the bottom of each summary.

Making sense of partnerships: a study of police and public housing department collaboration for tackling drug and related problems on public housing estates

By Keith Jacobs et al. for the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund (Australia)

The aim of this project is to explore the realities of partnership work by focusing on collaboration between the police and housing departments to tackle problems associated with illicit drug activity and anti-social behaviour (ASB) on three Australian public housing estates.

Two important assumptions informed the project. Firstly, ASB (for example, vandalism, litter, petty crime, intimidation and noise nuisance) and drug consumption are often intertwined. Secondly, although partnerships are presented by government agencies as a model for tackling complex policy problems, there has not been an Australian empirical study examining how it is experienced by key actors within the police and housing departments.

The project was conducted over a two-year period. The findings indicate that police and housing partnerships to tackle drug-related problems are (in theory) viewed positively by both departments. However, there are a range of factors that can undermine partnership work, including lack of time, staff turnover, absence of an identifiable problem and competing interdepartmental perspectives on the appropriate modes of intervention.

In all three localities, progress following the signing of MOUs (memorandums of understanding between the police and housing departments on partnership protocols) was varied. On the positive side, the partnerships engagement enhanced the scope for networking opportunities, leading to information sharing about areas of common concern and continued support for existing arrangements such as the “Officer Next Door” program and for new initiatives such as an audit of drug and alcohol education in schools. While there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that these collaborations had an impact on reducing crime and drug-related activity, they can be seen as part of a range of interventions, including physical renewal and community-building programs, that have led to improvements for residents.

It is important to understand that partnership practices can only achieve limited goals. The problems of illicit drug use and ASB within public housing estates are, in part, symptoms of more deep-seated causal factors such as poverty and social exclusion.

Partnership work is most effective when the causal factors are addressed as part of a wider neighbourhood management strategy. The appendix to this report provides a “good practice” guide on the issues that stem from the research.

To access the full report (Monograph Series No. 26), please visit: www.ndlerf.gov.au/pub.php

Development of police-reported delinquency among Canadian youth born in 1987 and 1990

By Peter J. Carrington for Statistics Canada

This report examines the development over childhood and adolescence of the recorded criminal activity of two cohorts of Canadians, born in 1987 and 1990. The data are drawn from the Incident-Based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR2) for 1995 to 2005. During that period, the UCR2 received information on crime and offenders from police services in six provinces, which provided policing services to about half of the population of Canada. This is the first large-scale developmental study of delinquency in Canada based on police-reported data.

The results are generally consistent with the findings of similar research in other countries, and of earlier Canadian research based on court records. Recorded delinquency is fairly widespread among Canadian teenagers. By the 18th birthday, just under one-fifth of the 1987 birth cohort — one-quarter of boys and one-eighth of girls — had been recorded by police as chargeable in a criminal incident, although not all were formally charged. The research tracked children born in 1990 from the fifth birthday, and found that very few children under 12 were recorded by police as offenders.

The number of children and youth involved in recorded crime increases with each year of age from very few five-year-olds to a peak of one in every 17 persons at the age of 16. The average number of recorded offences committed per year by offenders also increases with age, but not as dramatically as the prevalence of offenders among the population.

Most child and adolescent offenders committed very few recorded offences, which were concentrated in the less serious types of crime: minor theft and other minor property offences, and minor assaults. A majority of offenders born in 1987 committed only one recorded offence up to their 18th birthday. A minority (10 per cent) committed five or more recorded offences. These “chronic offenders” averaged 11 offences each, and were responsible as a group for almost half (46 per cent) of all recorded crime committed by members of the cohort. There was little evidence of specialization in one type of crime by the offenders in this study, and most of that was in property offences. There was no evidence of a progression by individual offenders from less to more serious types of crime.

It is difficult to draw conclusions about the duration of the delinquent and criminal careers of this population, because no information was available on their offending after the 18th birthday. Thus, we do not know whether their “delinquent careers” continued into adulthood as “criminal careers.”

To access the full report, please visit:
www.statcan.ca/bsolc/english/bsolc?catno=85-561-MWE2007009

The ecosystem for organized crime

By Marcus Felson
Rutgers University

The intellectual study of organized crime suffers from at least four major distractions: (a) mixing overall analysis with the requirements of prosecution, (b) understating the diversity of criminal co-operation, (c) underestimating how crime

co-operation interacts with legitimate activities, and (d) overestimating the degree of planning and sophistication needed for offender symbiosis to occur.

This paper draws from the life sciences to analyze criminal co-operation in full diversity, yet with greater clarity. In the process, the author produces 12 principles to help understand “the web of criminal co-operation.” The author distinguishes public, semi-public, semi-private, and private aspects of criminal co-operation, and emphasizes the dependence of organized crime on the failure to manage public space.

The televised version of organized crime depicts highly organized people in business suits sitting around a table for meetings, with intricate co-ordination across a vast field, and a certain brilliance of mind. Scholars have long told us that the televised version of organized crime is substantially wrong — that most organized crime is much smaller in scale and co-ordination.

The interplay of many crimes produces a web of interdependence. Small time thefts lead to fencing stolen goods, providing thieves money for purchasing small amounts of illegal drugs, contributing to small-time drug dealing, feeding into large-scale drug dealing.

This web of crime co-operation exposes each crime to a larger environment, without which it cannot thrive.

These ideas lead me towards an unusual set of recommendations for understanding organized crime in society, as well as reducing it:

• Focus on the acts, not the group engaging in it.
• Divide co-operative and organized crimes into very specific types.
• Study the vast variation in criminal co-operation and organization.
• Assume minimal levels of co-operative complexity, that such crime is seldom ingenious.
• Don’t follow the money; follow the physical transactions.
• Don’t look for deep secrets; look for the obvious and almost obvious.
• Find out how one crime depends on another.
• Find out how crime feeds off legitimate and marginal activities.
• Tease out the sequence of events for ongoing criminal co-operation.
• Interfere with that sequence, access to the customer, or modus operandi.
• Forget the bosses; monitor and thwart the opportunity for small-time crime.
• Use situational prevention to reduce crime opportunities that feed organized crime, directly and indirectly.

It’s quite a bit of work to figure out the interdependencies among many types of crime, and between criminal and legal activities. The efforts to do so increasingly pay off in finding out how to control organized criminal efforts. For example, Canadian authorities realized that marijuana growing operations depend on very large amounts of electricity, thus giving up their locations as well as providing a policy handle to close them down.

To access the full report (HEUNI Paper No. 26), please visit: www.heuni.fi/12542.htm