Organised crime movement across local communities: A network approach

Abstract

This paper explores the structure of organised crime movement across local communities and the drivers underpinning such movement. Firstly, it builds on network analysis to offer a novel methodological approach to empirically and quantitatively study the movement of organised crime offenders across geographical areas. The paper then applies this approach to evidence from Cambridgeshire in the United Kingdom. It reconstructs the movement of organised crime members across local areas based on a large-scale police dataset that includes 41 months of recorded crime events. It identifies organised crime “turf” and “target” areas and then explores the drivers of movement from the former to the latter using Exponential Random Graph Models. Findings confirm that geographical distance matters; however, socio-demographic, urban, economic and crime-related characteristics of communities play a key role. Organised crime group members target urban communities with higher than average illegal market opportunities (proxied by drug-related activity). The work also finds the effect of socio-demographic homophily between turf and target communities, suggesting that organised crime group members might target territories that are similar to their own. While a high level of deprivation makes a community more likely to send organised crime members, its impact on a community’s probability of being a receiver is less clear. Finally, the paper offers a way to identify communities (local areas) at risk of being targeted by criminal organisations, thus providing practitioners with a tool for early interventions.