Opportunistic Crimes Research Articles

Understanding the role of street network configurations in the placement of illegitimately operating facilities

AbstractThe role of street networks in shaping the spatial distribution of crime has become a foundational component within environmental criminology. Most studies, however, have focused on opportunistic crime types, such as property offenses. In this study, we instead research a theoretically distinct phenomenon by examining the placement of venues that host criminal activity. In particular, we study the relationship between network structure and the placement of illicit massage businesses, which operate on the intersections of illicit and legitimate activity by hosting illicit commercial sex under the guise of legitimate massage. We model their placement as a function of two network metrics: betweenness, which measures a street's usage potential, and a variant called “local betweenness,” which measures the potential of nearby streets. Multilevel models are used to examine the importance of these street‐level metrics while accounting for tract‐level covariates. Our findings demonstrate that, unlike property crimes, illicit massage businesses tend to be located on streets that are themselves quiet but that are close to areas of high activity. Such locations seem to combine accessibility and discretion, and therefore, represent ideal conditions for such businesses to thrive. Our findings can inform problem‐oriented approaches to prevent the harms associated with illegitimately operating businesses.

Social Grounds of Pickpocket in Metropolitan City: Attitude and Aftermath Effect among the Sufferer

The study delves into the complex phenomenon of pickpocketing, a global affliction that persists across nations like India, posing a familiar threat to individuals in crowded spaces. Despite its historical roots as an opportunistic crime, pickpocketing has evolved into an organized enterprise, often involving economically disadvantaged individuals forming groups. While prevalent in major cities worldwide, pickpocketing lacks explicit legal recognition in India's Penal Code, falling under broader theft laws. Leveraging data from automated fare collection systems and trajectory analysis, this research refines anomaly-detection applications to identify suspicious behaviors, shedding light on the environmental factors shaping pickpocketing trends. The study focuses on the social considerations of pickpocketing in Kolkata, India, exploring victim experiences and perceptions. Findings reveal the broader social impacts of pickpocketing, beyond just financial loss, with victims enduring significant social and psychological distress. Despite lacking specific legal penalties, pickpocketing remains a prevalent issue, highlighting the need for collective efforts from governments, law enforcement, and the public to combat it effectively.

The nexus between corruption and opportunistic crimes during Covid-19 in South Africa

Covid 19 in South Africa created opportunity for criminals to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. Public and private sector officials benefited due to irregular tenders and overpricing of personal protective equipments in South Africa as reported on media platforms. This article explores opportunistic crimes associated with Covid 19 and their impact on the fight against the pandemic. This qualitative article adopted a non-empirical research design: Systematic review, indirect observation schedules to identify and describe available research literature ‘using systematic and explicit accountable methods and pre-specified formalised tools for searching and integrating literature.
 The data was collected from January-July 2021. The collected data was analysed through inductive textual content analysis. Findings revealed that public officials benefited from irregular PPE tenders as well as friends and families of politicians. The findings further indicate that billions of Rands were looted from funds which were meant to fight Covid 19 in South Africa. Lastly the findings show that law enforcement agencies are not effective in dealing with cases of Covid 19 crimes. Based on the findings, the following recommendations were developed: Law enforcement agencies should be equipped with resources to deal with Covid 19 crimes and ensure successful prosecution of those crimes, Competition Commission should investigate the companies which benefited from irregular tenders and overpricing of PPE’s so that they could be held accountable. Public participation should be strengthened to combat crime.

Chinese organized crime and the illegal wildlife trade: diversification and outsourcing in the Golden Triangle

The illegal wildlife trade has increasingly been linked to organized crime in recent years. In particular, Chinese crime groups seem to be major players in more organized forms of this trade. This article examines the involvement of Chinese organized crime groups in the trade of wildlife in the borderlands of the Golden Triangle. We will discuss the representation of Chinese crime groups in the illegal wildlife trade by looking at: a) the diversification of these crime groups into wildlife crimes and b) the outsourcing of activities to local opportunistic crime groups in neighboring Laos and Myanmar. We conclude that the different representations of Chinese crime groups overseas involved in the illegal wildlife trade are important in order to understand the roles of diversification and outsourcing.

Addressing Instability in Thailand’s Deep South with Law and Development

Abstract This article approaches the long-standing instability in the southernmost part of Thailand, where a vast majority of the population is Muslim, from a law and development perspective. The instability has resulted from a highly complicated conflict, of which religious and ethnic differences, political conflict, and even organized crime are generally claimed as the main causes. The article directs its attention to a sense of resentment among the Muslim population, which has arisen from enduring economic disparities and injustice they have suffered at the hands of the authorities. Addressing these two closely related issues certainly does not lead to a resolution of the conflict, but tackling them in an interrelated manner at least clarifies one of its significant aspects and contributes in a meaningful way to the ongoing search for a sustainable peace in Thailand’s southernmost region. The law and development approach we have adopted for this study attempts to show how the existing regulatory design (laws, legal frameworks, institutions) has been implemented – that is, how it has been complied with in terms of generation of action programs and strategies (in the form of security operations and development initiatives) and to what effect. Based on our findings, the quality of the implementation represents a major condition for the failure of the law and development implementation in Thailand’s Deep South. We therefore highlight the necessity of genuine political will and the enhancement of the state capacity for law enforcement through eradication of corruption and opportunistic crime as a feasible solution in this context.

Opportunistic or Non-Random Wildlife Crime? Attractiveness Rather Than Abundance in the Wild Leads to Selective Parrot Poaching

Illegal wildlife trade, which mostly focuses on high-demand species, constitutes a major threat to biodiversity. However, whether poaching is an opportunistic crime within high-demand taxa such as parrots (i.e., harvesting proportional to species availability in the wild), or is selectively focused on particular, more desirable species, is still under debate. Answering this question has important conservation implications because selective poaching can lead to the extinction of some species through overharvesting. However, the challenges of estimating species abundances in the wild have hampered studies on this subject. We conducted a large-scale survey in Colombia to simultaneously estimate the relative abundance of wild parrots through roadside surveys (recording 10,811 individuals from 25 species across 2221 km surveyed) and as household, illegally trapped pets in 282 sampled villages (1179 individuals from 21 species). We used for the first time a selectivity index to test selection on poaching. Results demonstrated that poaching is not opportunistic, but positively selects species based on their attractiveness, defined as a function of species size, coloration, and ability to talk, which is also reflected in their local prices. Our methodological approach, which shows how selection increases the conservation impacts of poaching for parrots, can be applied to other taxa also impacted by harvesting for trade or other purposes.

The convergence of environmental crime with other serious crimes: Subtypes within the environmental crime continuum

The rising global scarcity of natural resources increasingly attracts transnational criminal organizations. Organized crime syndicates diversify into the lucrative business of tropical timber, endangered species, and natural minerals, alongside their traditional activities. The developing interconnectedness between environmental crime and other serious crimes shows that traditional lines of separation are no longer appropriate for understanding and dealing with the increasing complexities of organized crime. Therefore, this article aims to analyse the nexus between environmental crime and other serious crimes through cluster analyses to identify subtypes of organized crime groups that have diversified into the illegal trade in natural resources. The two-step cluster algorithm found a cluster solution with three distinct clusters of subtypes of criminal groups that diversified into the illegal trade in natural resources in various ways: first, the Green Organized Crime cluster, with a high degree of diversification and domination; second, the Green Opportunistic Crime cluster, with flexible and fluid groups that partially diversify their criminal activities; and, third, the low-level diversifiers of the Green Camouflaged Crime cluster, shadowing their illegal businesses with legitimate companies. The three clusters can be related to specific stages within the environmental crime continuum, albeit with nuances.

Opportunistic crimes: Evaluation of DNA from regularly-used knives after a brief use by a different person

Opportunistic crimes: Evaluation of DNA from regularly-used knives after a brief use by a different person

Malice Aforethought

AbstractThis paper examines why criminal intent matters in sentencing. In particular, it considers two types of crimes, opportunistic and premeditated. Opportunistic crimes are ones that present themselves to a criminal and can be deterred if the victim makes it too costly for the criminal through private property protection. Premeditated crimes are ones sought out by the criminal, and the effect of private property protection is simply to displace crime. This difference between deterrence and displacement leads to the result that it is optimal to punish premeditated crimes more. The extent to which this is true, however, lies in the response by potential victims. If victims protect themselves from premeditated crimes in ways that also protect them from opportunistic ones, then the difference in penalties is relatively less.

Keeping Pace with Criminals: An Extended Study of Designing Patrol Allocation against Adaptive Opportunistic Criminals

Game theoretic approaches have recently been used to model the deterrence effect of patrol officers’ assignments on opportunistic crimes in urban areas. One major challenge in this domain is modeling the behavior of opportunistic criminals. Compared to strategic attackers (such as terrorists) who execute a well-laid out plan, opportunistic criminals are less strategic in planning attacks and more flexible in executing well-laid plans based on their knowledge of patrol officers’ assignments. In this paper, we aim to design an optimal police patrolling strategy against opportunistic criminals in urban areas. Our approach is comprised by two major parts: learning a model of the opportunistic criminal (and how he or she responds to patrols) and then planning optimal patrols against this learned model. The planning part, by using information about how criminals responds to patrols, takes into account the strategic game interaction between the police and criminals. In more detail, first, we propose two categories of models for modeling opportunistic crimes. The first category of models learns the relationship between defender strategy and crime distribution as a Markov chain. The second category of models represents the interaction of criminals and patrol officers as a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) with the number of criminals as the unobserved hidden states. To this end, we: (i) apply standard algorithms, such as Expectation Maximization (EM), to learn the parameters of the DBN; (ii) modify the DBN representation that allows for a compact representation of the model, resulting in better learning accuracy and the increased speed of learning of the EM algorithm when used for the modified DBN. These modifications exploit the structure of the problem and use independence assumptions to factorize the large joint probability distributions. Next, we propose an iterative learning and planning mechanism that periodically updates the adversary model. We demonstrate the efficiency of our learning algorithms by applying them to a real dataset of criminal activity obtained from the police department of the University of Southern California (USC) situated in Los Angeles, CA, USA. We project a significant reduction in crime rate using our planning strategy as compared to the actual strategy deployed by the police department. We also demonstrate the improvement in crime prevention in simulation when we use our iterative planning and learning mechanism when compared to just learning once and planning. Finally, we introduce a web-based software for recommending patrol strategies, which is currently deployed at USC. In the near future, our learning and planning algorithm is planned to be integrated with this software. This work was done in collaboration with the police department of USC.

Islamophobia on Social Media: A Qualitative Analysis of the Facebook’s Walls of Hate

IntroductionThe growth and expansion of the Internet has created many positive opportunities for people to communicate and engage in a manner. However, it has also acted as a double-edged sword (Back et al., 2010) by creating an online vacuum and platform for people using hate as a means to appeal to a wider audience often under the cloak of anonymity that allows them to supersede and bypass editorial control and regulation (Bargh & McKenna, 2004; Blair, 2003; Citron, 2014; Hodges & Perry, 1999). The Internet therefore provides new opportunities for cyber-bullying (Hinduja & Patchin, 2008; Kowalski, et al., 2012) and cyber hate (Jaishankar, 2008).Online hate speech, bullying, incitement and threats of violence have in recent times become a key issue for social media networks, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and policy-makers. In England and Wales, it is an offence to stir up and incite hatred through illegal hate content on the grounds of: race, religion and sexual orientation. There are also other offences such as using the content of a website which can also be illegal when it threatens or harasses a person or a group of people. If such material is posted because of hostility based on race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender then it can be viewed as a hate crime. This material can also be disseminated in either words, pictures, video, music and could include; messages calling for racial or religious violence, direct webpages with pictures, videos or descriptions that glorify violence against anyone due to their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or because they are transgender and chat forums, where people ask other people to commit hate crimes.Messages can be spread at great speed, people can remain anonymous and the nature of cyber space remains unregulated. In particular for hate groups, wanting to recruit people for their cause and also be given a platform to spread unsolicited material which can often go unnoticed (Hewson et al., 2003). This allows them to capture audiences and use the Internet as a propaganda tool for those purposes. Indeed, these communicative messages can also cause a lot of discontent and impact upon measures of community cohesion (McNamee et al., 2010).Hate speech in this context is any form of language used to depict someone in a negative fashion in regards to their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation or physical and mental disability with promotes hate and incites violence (Yar, 2013; Feldman et al., 2013). This also links into the convergence of emotional distress caused by hate online, the nature of intimidation and harassment online, and the prejudice that seeks to defame groups through speech intending to injure and intimidate.Hate on the Internet can have direct and indirect experiences for victims and communities being targeted (Awan & Zempi, 2015a; Awan, 2016; Chakraborti & Garland, 2009). In one sense, it can be used to harass and intimidate victims and on the other hand, it can also be used for opportunistic crimes (Christopherson, 2007). The Internet, therefore is a powerful tool by which people can be influenced to act in a certain way and manner. What also is left in terms of direct impact is important, because it impacts upon local communities and the understanding of how this could constitute acts of violence offline (Douglas et al., 2005). Awan and Zempi (2015) found that online and offline anti-Muslim hate crime can impact upon people's lives to the extent that they feel a sense of anxiety, depression and feelings of isolation. This is particularly strong when considering hate speech online that aims to threaten and incite violence.As noted above, a lot of the material online can also cause a lot of fear and it is imperative that the police and other agencies within the security sector work together to tackle hate crime on the Internet (Awan & Zempi, 2015b). …

Illegal and Legal Parrot Trade Shows a Long-Term, Cross-Cultural Preference for the Most Attractive Species Increasing Their Risk of Extinction

Illegal trade constitutes a major threat for a variety of wildlife. A criminology framework has been recently applied to parrot poaching in Mexico, suggesting an opportunistic crime in which the most abundant and accessible species, and not the rare or highly priced species, were poached more often. We analyzed this information, together with additional long-term data (1981–2005) on both the legal and illegal trade of the 22 Mexican parrot species (n = 31,019 individuals), using multivariate statistics and hypothesis-testing approaches. Our results showed a selective capture of parrot species attending to their attractiveness. Parrot species widely differed in attractiveness to people (as reflected by their combined measures of body size, coloration, and ability to imitate human speech), and their attractiveness strongly correlated with their prices both in the Mexican and US markets. The most attractive and valuable species (amazons and macaws) were disproportionally caught attending to the number of years they were legally trapped. Similar patterns were found for parrots poached for the domestic Mexican market, for those smuggled to the USA, and for those legally exported before or after 1992, when the USA ban led parrot exports to be mostly directed to European countries. Finally, the long-term cross-cultural preference for the most attractive species has led them to be among the most threatened species today. Since current parrot poaching mostly responds to local demand, socio-ecological work is needed to reverse the long-standing pet-keeping tradition that may decimate the most desired species in Neotropical countries.

LOST IN THE MAIL: A FIELD EXPERIMENT ON CRIME

Stealing, shirking, and opportunistic behavior in general can create barriers to the development of markets. The costs associated with such behavior are shared by both firms and individuals and can be large enough to even prevent the initiation of trade. Measurement of these costs is difficult because information is not available for transactions that fail to occur. We use a field experiment to identify opportunistic crime in a task that is important and relevant for trade: the delivery of mail. We subtly manipulate the content and information available in mail sent to households across neighborhoods that vary by income, and detected high levels of shirking and stealing. Eighteen percent of the mail never arrived at its destination, and significantly more was lost if there was even a slight hint of something additional inside the envelope. Our results demonstrate the importance of transaction costs created by crime and that not all populations are equally affected. Middle‐income neighborhoods suffer the most. (JEL C93, K42, H41, L87, O21)

An appraisal of United Nations and other money laundering and financing of terrorism counter‐measures

PurposeThe purpose of the paper was to examine the challenges inherent in harnessing the UN and other AML counter‐measures, paying particular attention to the United Nations Resolutions on countering financing of terrorism and why the UN Security Resolutions have not been easy to invoke. As regards other AML counter‐measures, the paper examined the legal status of soft law instruments, articulating the possible reasons why they are easy to implement.Design/methodology/approachThe paper was written by the analysis of UN and other AML counter‐measures – which were evaluated in the gaze of how they have been implemented across states. While states are under an obligation to implement UN AML counter‐measures such as international treaties and soft law instruments, private banks as non‐state actors have exploited some loopholes in the law to flaunt them. This has undermined the efficacy of global AML counter‐measures. Many banks have been fined for violating UN sanctions on countries like Iran and Sudan. These examples were utilized in appraising the current UN and other AML counter‐measures across states.FindingsThe findings of the paper were compelling in demonstrating that global anti‐money laundering laws are often emasculated by the fact that they are implemented in the realm of international law. International law manifests itself within independent member states' vested strategic self‐interests. In the event of conflicts, national self‐interests will prevail. But again, money laundering is an opportunistic crime because it generates both synergies and externalities and the response of individual states often depends on how it is affected by it. It is wrong to assume as doing things in the realm of international law is not as easy as it is presumed to be.Research limitations/implicationsIt would have been better to carry out interviews so as to corroborate secondary data sources used in writing this paper. But due to some constraints, this option was not possible. It would also have been better to undertake the analysis of data based on a large sample of countries rather than cherry picking. While implementing AML counter‐measures in the realm of international law is necessary to foster international co‐operation, there are still some loopholes that need to be paid more attention.Originality/valueThe paper was written, analysed and evaluated based on the most recent literature on implementation of UN and other AML counter‐measures across countries. It also utilized the recent cases involving violations of UN AML counter‐measures by banks on sanctioned countries such as Iran and Sudan.

Heroic Leaders as White‐Collar Criminals: An Empirical Study

AbstractIn an empirical study of 179 white‐collar criminals, we identify a subset of 28 who may be called having a ‘heroic’ status, having received official recognition for contributions to society and fame prior to their being exposed and convicted as white‐collar criminals. We argue that these people are close to the classical picture of the white‐collar criminal, which implies that they are more likely not to be suspected of crimes. They are older, richer, and more powerful than the regular criminals. They also commit crimes assuming the roles of leaders in the crime. Most importantly, it seems as if the combination of heroic status and executive positions induces people to commit large‐scale opportunistic crimes late in their lives. The apparent onset of criminal behaviour late in life may be triggered by latent narcissistic traits. Our study contributes to a differentiated view on the profile of white‐collar criminals and derailed leadership. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fighting Fire with Fire: Rethinking the Role of Disgust in Hate Crimes

Fighting Fire with Fire: Rethinking the Role of Disgust in Hate Crimes

'Fighting Fire with Fire': Rethinking the Role of Disgust in Hate Crimes

This essay asks how communities should respond to crimes expressing hate, not merely toward an individual victim, but also toward the larger group of which that victim is part. In particular it explores the proposal of Dan Kahan, that communities have been, and should be, mobilizing the emotion of disgust expressed in hate crimes themselves. It argues that Kahan's approach to hate crimes is deeply flawed, for several reasons. First, fighting disgust fire with disgust fire is less prevalent as a response by targeted groups than Kahan suggests: an examination of the strategies of recently-targeted Arab and Muslim Americans, and gays and lesbians who have been longstanding targets of group-based violence, reveals that neither group has deployed this approach to any significant degree. The varied strategies used by these groups have, in fact, focused less on the public perception of the perpetrator than on the public stigma associated with the targeted population. This focus is appropriate given the essay's second major argument: that recent research has shown group-based violence to be not a simple expression of hierarchical judgment, but an opportunistic crime, in which perpetrators negotiate a range of status-related anxieties through agression against socially stigmatized targets. Public expressions of disgust may, in fact, incite potential perpetrators, without addressing the stigmatization that constructs some groups as available targets. Third, a regime of publicly-articulated disgust is also likely to produce forms of subjectivity and civic engagement that will corrode the social fabric of the communities in which it is deployed. Finally, the essay concludes that a better approach would use enhanced sanctions to draw the lines regarding acceptable conduct, and would direct community-based efforts toward mitigating or eliminating the stigma that creates available targets.