NCJ Number
216834
Date Published
2006
Length
20 pages
Annotation
Utilizing the sciences, this report analyzes criminal cooperation (organized crime) with greater clarity and full diversity.
Abstract
In order to understand how offenders cooperate, one needs to go beyond any one group of offenders or any one crime. One must consider how such cooperation diversifies. Viewing organized crime as a social network does not solve the problem. There needs to be an intellectual image of criminal cooperation. Making progress in understanding organized crime requires shifting focus towards specific and tangible events, their specific sequences, and their specific settings. These provide the structure within which social groups and networks work. Offenders are likely to converge in certain settings. These settings are places that set the stage for crime, where some involve complete criminal transactions. In addition, crime generally requires a degree of concealment. This process is largely physical and dependent upon the location of a setting where the transaction occurs. The interplay of many crimes produces a web of interdependence or a web of crime cooperation. The web of crime cooperation exposes each crime to a larger environment, without which it cannot survive. This leads to a set of unusual recommendations for understanding organized crime in society, as well as reducing it: (1) focus on the acts, not the group(s); (2) divide cooperative and organized crimes into specific types; (3) study the vast variation in criminal cooperation and organization; (4) assume minimal levels of cooperative complexity; (5) follow the physical transactions; (6) look for the obvious and almost obvious; (7) find out how one crime depends on another; (8) find out how crime feeds off legitimate and marginal activities; (9) tease out the sequence of events; (10) interfere with that sequence; (11) monitor and stop the opportunity for small-time crime; and (12) use situational prevention to reduce crime opportunities.