Crime Risk and Vulnerability

MARCH 2010www.et21symposium.org

PROGRAM ON GLOBAL SECURITY

et21.rutgers.edu

Estee Marchi

is athird year PhDstudent at RutgersSchool of CriminalJustice. Comingfrom a backgroundin sociology, shecompleted her Masters inComparativeCriminology at theUniversity of Wales, Bangor inthe UnitedKingdom.Dissertation plansincludeethnographicresearch on the IrishRepublican Army,for applicationtowardunderstanding themutation and potentiallegitimization of terroristorganizationswithin hostsocieties.

SYMPOSIUM BRIEF

Data Needs + Structures

How do we prepare for the unthinkable, the improbable? Risk and vulnerability areterrains that citizens must navigate in the course of everyday life. Vulnerability tocrime in daily life, scaling from the individual to global levels, can affect the qualityof life in both tangible and intangible ways. That is, both crime and fear of crime havegreat fiscal, social, and psychological costs. To navigate risk of crime we must iden-tify and recognize particular types of harm, or injury, loss, or detriment to the personor the society. This is important because different types of harm are tied to the per-ceived nature of their consequences. Crime itself has economic and physical costs,and fear of crime can exacerbate and create costs on its own. Security itself is dy-namic, and is as much a physical structure or set of procedures as it is a social con-struct.Security depends on differential access to resources, including economic, so-cial and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1993). Proper consideration of risk assessment iscrucial because crime is frequently a correlate of terrorism, cyber security, supply-chain management and global health. The development of a scalable and malleablecrime risk assessment methodology is necessary to develop a common methodologyfor global threats assessment and management.What is crime? Any methodology must employ both conceptualization of thetopic and defining what the units of analysis are. Though crime necessarily variesfrom place to place, it may be regarded generally as an act committed in violation of alaw that prohibits it and authorizes punishment for its commission. Units of analysisfor crime include four elements: offender, victim, offense and incident (Maxfield &Babbie, 2009: 97). An offense is defined as an individual act that violates the lawwhereas an incident is one or more offenses committed by the same offender, or groupof offenders acting in concert, at the same time and place (Maxfield & Babbie, 2009:98). For non-violent, non-terrorism based crime, asset value target estimation is atool for to use to quantify the desirability of the target and its likelihood of victimiza-tion.190 University Ave, Suite 219 Newark, New Jersey 07102Tel (973) 353-5416 Fax (973) 353-5074

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It is also necessary to examine and quantify the approximate likelihood of criminal inci-dent. Criminal statistics and asset target value estimates are the two main prongs that an anti-crime risk assessment methodology should employ. These types of estimations can help build ascalable methodology that is sensitive to emerging crimes and ongoing issues in the global con-text. Developing a methodology that quantifies aspects of value and risk can help inform the practices and policies of both detection and surveillance for crime prevention.

Methodology

With the conceptualization in mind, we can turn to how a methodology employs such elementsin the measurement of crime. Criminal statistics are one of the key elements for manufacturingcriminal criteria estimates. The most widely known measures of crime are police records andcrimes reported to police. Obviously, crimes not known to the police cannot be measured withthese police records, and require a different. Data should ideally go back several years, in order to be sensitive to changes in trends. This is referred to as longitudinal analysis. Major and mi-nor crimes should be included. Major crimes could include murders, rapes, assaults, and major economic crimes. Minor crimes should include vehicle crimes and misdemeanor crimes. Thistypology of crime grouping and data collection is referred to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)in the United States. Crime statistics that are reported by the police and other law enforcementagencies do not represent the full picture of crime in a given society. This is not a flaw withinthe data collection process, the methodology of collection, or even of honesty or thoroughnessof the collecting agencies.Official crime statistics can necessarily only reflect crime that is reported to the police.There are varying reasons why some crimes are not reported. For example, some victims of burglary or embezzlement may not realize there has been a theft. Or some may not wish to dis-close their victimization for fear of further interaction with the perpetrator or disclosure of their own criminal activities to law enforcement agencies. There are also so called “victimless”crimes. These are infractions of criminal law where there is no identifiable evidence that anindividual has suffered any damage from the infraction. Often, a person engaging in a victim-less crime may see themselves not as a victim, but rather a customer. This is especially notablein drug and prostitution transactions. This data is missing from measures based on crimesknown to police. This missing data is referred to in criminal justice as “the dark figure of crime.” The primary means of shining light onto this figure is through the collection of data viaself-report and victimization surveys. These surveys are designed and produced to thoroughlyaddress missing crime data by collecting data from citizens about their experiences of crime andcriminal victimization. It provides a more comprehensive picture of the nature of criminal ac-tivity and rates of victimization. Though anonymity and confidentiality is routine for thesetypes of surveys, one cannot assume precise veracity or accuracy of any dataset. This is a simi-lar problem for official crime statistics. Some jurisdictions or agencies do not collect or submitthe data, either through choice or through neglect.

Crime Risk and Vulnerability

ET21 PROGRAM ON GLOBAL SECURITY

March 2010

Crime Risk and Vulnerability

Victimization surveys are not necessarily good measures of victimless crimes becausethe respondents cannot be easily conceived of as victims. Status offenses such as truancy andcurfew violations are also crimes that do not have identifiable victims. One way of obtaining amore complete picture of criminal activity is surveys of offenders. These self-report surveysask respondents not about how they were victimized, but rather what criminal activity they haveengaged in. If all crimes require an offender, and one does not have access to an identifiablevictim, and the crime was not observed by police, witnesses or victims, the most appropriatemeans to discover crime is to question the offender.Victimization surveys sample members of a population and ask them about their experi-ence with the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of criminal activity. The NationalCrime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the tool used in the United States to gather this data andis the primary source of data about criminal victimization. It is conducted yearly, and is used by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to publish reports about the rate of violent crime in Americansociety. Many other countries have and use similar surveys to collect data. However, attemptsto compare data from nations has failed for use on regional and international levels. This is be-cause definitions of crime and other methodological differences are too large for proper com- parison. There have been attempts to modify this problem. One way is to design the method-ology to be adaptive to the time and social and legal context in which it is conducted. This waythe data can be compared with some measure of reliability, or that the measure is measuringsomething consistently. At the international level, the International Crime Victims Survey(ICVS) has been used to measure victimization data while being sensitive to differences in so-cial and legal definitions of crime. The European Survey on Crime and Safety is another meas-ure, and is compatible for use with the ICVS.Terrorism may be considered a criminal act, but its unique properties as an emergentthreat to global security necessitates the separate development of a methodology for risk assess-ment. There are several frameworks that exist that can help to assess the value of a potentialcriminal target. Thomas L. Norman (2010: 169) lays out elements for economic crime assettarget value estimates that include: “is there an opportunity for economic gain; what the prob-ability for success is; what the probability for escape is; and, what is the probability for escapewithout subsequent capture.” These questions should be used as indicators of how attractivekey assets are to economic criminals.The estimation framework for non-terrorism violent crime asset value is similar in that it proposes several questions that are similar to those assessing economic crime. Whatever theunderpinning causes, almost all violent criminals use some judgment, or a hedonistic calculus,in committing their crimes. Most violent criminals who are aware of their actions use certaincriteria to determine if and when to conduct a violent act, including: “is there an available sur-veillance position to reconnoiter the target before finally selecting it; is access identification re-quired before entry (including electronic surveillance and human security); is forcible entry possible, is there any sneak-path for entry, exit, or both; is the asset or subject vulnerable to di-rect physical attack or intimidation through the use of force; can entry be made through socialengineering; what is the probability of success of the physical attack (is the victim likely to beoverwhelmed by force; and, what is the probability of escape” (Norman, 2010: 170). The as-sessment may rank results of value by individual asset and by asset class (people, property, in-formation, and business reputation) (Norman, 2010: 171). Fear of crime, and especially violentvictimization, exerts a powerful influence on everything from the individual’s daily quality of