̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - criminology

Airbnb rentals linked to increased crime rates in London neighbourhoods

fpjl2 — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:24:17 +0000

Latest research has revealed a ‘positive association’ between the number of properties listed as Airbnb rentals and police-reported robberies and violent crimes in thousands of London neighbourhoods between 2015 and 2018.

In fact, the study led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge suggests that a 10% increase in active Airbnb rentals in the city would correspond to an additional 1,000 robberies per year across London.*

Urban sociologists say the rapid pace at which crime rises in conjunction with new rentals suggests that the link is related more to opportunities for crime, rather than loss of cohesion within communities – although both are likely contributing factors.

“We tested for the most plausible alternative explanations, from changes in police patrols to tourist hotspots and even football matches,” said Dr Charles Lanfear from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, co-author of the study published today in the journal Criminology.

“Nothing changed the core finding that Airbnb rentals are related to higher crime rates in London neighbourhoods.”

“While Airbnb offers benefits to tourists and hosts in terms of ease and financial reward, there may be social consequences to turning large swathes of city neighbourhoods into hotels with little regulation,” Lanfear said.

Founded in 2008, Airbnb is a giant of the digital economy, with more than 5 million property hosts now active on the platform in some 100,000 cities worldwide.

However, concerns that Airbnb is contributing to unaffordable housing costs has led to a backlash among residents of cities such as Barcelona, and calls for greater regulation.

London is one of the most popular Airbnb markets in the world. An estimated 4.5 million guests stayed in a London Airbnb during the period covered by the study.

Lanfear and his ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania co-author Professor David Kirk used masses of data from AirDNA: a site that scrapes Airbnb to provide figures, trends and approximate geolocations for the short-term letting market.

They mapped AirDNA data from 13 calendar quarters (January 2015 to March 2018) onto ‘Lower Layer Super Output Areas’, or LSOAs.

These are designated areas of a few streets containing around two thousand residents, used primarily for UK census purposes. There are 4,835 LSOAs in London, and all were included in the study.

Crime statistics from the UK Home Office and Greater London Authority for 6 categories – robbery, burglary, theft, anti-social behaviour, any violence, and bodily harm – were then mapped onto LSOAs populated with AirDNA data.

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed all forms of Airbnb lets, but found the link between active Airbnbs and crime is primarily down to entire properties for rent, rather than spare or shared rooms.

̽��ֱ��association between active Airbnb rentals and crime was most significant for robbery and burglary, followed by theft and any violence. No link was found for anti-social behaviour and bodily harm.

On average across London, an additional Airbnb property was associated with a 2% increase in the robbery rate within an LSOA. This association was 1% for thefts, 0.9% for burglaries, and 0.5% for violence.

“While the potential criminogenic effect for each Airbnb rental is small, the accumulative effect of dozens in a neighbourhood, or tens of thousands across the city, is potentially huge,” Lanfear said.

He points out that London had an average of 53,000 active lettings in each calendar-quarter of the study period, and an average of 11 lettings per LSOA.

At its most extreme, one neighbourhood in Soho, an area famed for nightlife, had a high of 318 dedicated Airbnbs – some 30% of all households in the LSOA.

̽��ֱ��data models suggest that a 3.2% increase in all types of Airbnb rentals per LSOA would correspond to a 1% increase in robberies city-wide: 325 additional robberies based on the figure of 32,500 recorded robberies in London in 2018.

Lanfear and Kirk extensively stress-tested the association between Airbnb listings and London crime rates.

This included factoring in ‘criminogenic variables’ such as property prices, police stops, the regularity of police patrols, and even English Premier League football games (by both incorporating attendance into data modelling, and removing all LSOAs within a kilometre of major games).

̽��ֱ��duo re-ran their data models excluding all the 259 LSOAs in central London’s Zone One, to see if the association was limited to high tourism areas with lots of Airbnb listings. ̽��ֱ��data models even incorporated the seasonal ‘ebb and flow’ of London tourism. Nothing changed the overall trends.

Prior to crunching the numbers, the researchers speculated that any link might be down to Airbnbs affecting ‘collective efficacy’: the social cohesion within a community, combined with a willingness to intervene for the public good.

̽��ֱ��study measured levels of collective efficacy across the city using data from both the Metropolitan Police and the Mayor of London’s Office, who conduct surveys on public perceptions of criminal activity and the likely responses of their community.

Collective efficacy across London is not only consistently high, but did not explain the association between Airbnbs and crime in the data models.

Moreover, when Airbnb listings rise, the effect on crime is more immediate than one caused by a slow erosion of collective efficacy. “Crime seems to go up as soon as Airbnbs appear, and stays elevated for as long as they are active,” said Lanfear.

̽��ֱ��researchers conclude it is likely driven by criminal opportunity. “A single Airbnb rental can create different types of criminal opportunity,” said Lanfear.

“An Airbnb rental can provide an easy potential victim such as a tourist unfamiliar with the area, or a property that is regularly vacant and so easier to burgle. A very temporary occupant may be more likely to cause criminal damage.”

“Offenders may learn to return to areas with more Airbnbs to find unguarded targets,” said Lanfear. “More dedicated Airbnb properties may mean fewer long-term residents with a personal stake in the area who are willing to report potential criminal activity.”

Airbnb has taken steps to prevent crime, including some background checks as well as requirements for extended bookings on occasions popular for one-night parties, such as New Year’s Eve. “ ̽��ֱ��fact that we still find an increase in crime despite Airbnb’s efforts to curtail it reveals the severity of the predicament,” said Kirk.

Added Lanfear: “Short-term letting sites such as Airbnb create incentives for landlords that lead to property speculation, and we can see the effect on urban housing markets. We can now see that the expansion of Airbnb may contribute to city crime rates.”

“It is not the company or even the property owners who experience the criminogenic side effects of Airbnb, it is the local residents building their lives in the neighbourhood.”

Notes:

*Above 2018 levels, which is when the study data ends.

Rising numbers of houses and flats listed as short-term lets on Airbnb are associated with higher rates of crimes such as burglaries and street robberies right across London, according to the most detailed study of its kind.

There may be social consequences to turning large swathes of city neighbourhoods into hotels with little regulation

Charles Lanfear

Karl Hendon/Getty

London townhouses in Greenwich

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cannabis farms are a modern slavery 'blind spot' for UK police, study suggests

fpjl2 — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 08:23:08 +0000

Research from Cambridge criminologists suggests that those charged with drug cultivation have often been forced into illegal work as a condition of debt to criminal gangs for smuggling them into the UK.

̽��ֱ��researchers, including a Detective Inspector who completed a Masters at Cambridge's Institute of Criminology, argue that police take too narrow a view of modern slavery when it comes to 'growers' arrested during cannabis farm raids.

While growers – often Vietnamese nationals – are not always imprisoned within farms, many work under threat of extreme violence towards themselves or family back home, with little in the way of language or contacts in the UK.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that arresting officers often lack detailed training on modern slavery, and make only 'perfunctory' enquiries: a brief question that places the onus on a victim who doesn't understand their own situation.

As such, migrants end up serving years in UK prisons despite being forced to commit the cultivation crimes by gangs who seize passports and threaten – and administer – violence.

" ̽��ֱ��abuses of freedom in cannabis farm cases do not tally with traditional perceptions of slavery. Victims may be held against their will, forced to work and unable to leave, despite an unlocked door," said Prof Heather Strang, the study's senior author.

"Big questions remain about how the criminal justice system should ethically manage modern slavery victims who are also illegal immigrants involved in illegal activity," she said.

̽��ֱ��new study, published in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, was co-authored by DI Adam Ramiz of Surrey Police as part of his research at Cambridge, where he worked with Strang and Prof Paul Rock from LSE.

Cannabis farms are unassuming abodes in towns and city suburbs that house hundreds of plants in blacked-out rooms, grown with equipment such specialist lighting. A live-in 'grower' will work for criminal gangs to feed and protect the Class B drug crop.

̽��ֱ��latest study is small in scale – gaining access to growers willing to talk is difficult – but criminologists say that it's an important addition to this under-researched area.

̽��ֱ��team looked at criminal histories of 19 Vietnamese nationals arrested in connection with cannabis farming in Surrey and Sussex between 2014-2017, and conducted in-depth interviews with three further growers – two Vietnamese and an Albanian – as well as the arresting officers in those cases.

̽��ֱ��growers all described being in hock to human smugglers, working in farms to pay debts, and some spoke of death threats and physical intimidation. Two spoke of dangerous journeys to the UK via lorries, similar to the 39 Vietnamese nationals found dead in Essex last year.

One witnessed murder by smugglers while trekking for days through forests. Another was locked inside the house once in the UK. ̽��ֱ��victims didn't consider themselves such, as they had wanted to come here, yet had been forced into illegal labour on arrival: smuggling that becomes trafficking.

Interviews with officers revealed police questioning on slavery to be limited, cursory and 'binary' – whether or not the grower was physically locked in – and conducted with a presumption of guilt on the that the grower is an offender.

"We found that some officers only had an hour of modern slavery training, and felt that the onus is on trafficking victims to volunteer that information, rather than police to investigate further," said Ramiz, who led the study.

" ̽��ֱ��brief question or two on slavery will often come after a grower has been given the standard legal advice to say nothing and later to plead guilty," he said.

Police frustrations focus on growers, with one officer talking of "hitting a brick wall" if they won't open up, but researchers say that the legal advice offered to trafficked cannabis growers is routine and uncritical: "go quietly".

They argue that police should 're-frame' their response to cannabis farms so that the possibility of modern slavery is "more fully considered", and suggest detailed training for front-line officers along with greater willingness to refer cases to specialist investigators.

Dame Sara Thornton, the UK's Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, described the study as a "welcome contribution to building an evidence-based approach to preventing modern slavery".

" ̽��ֱ��Modern Slavery Act includes a statutory defence for those compelled to commit an offence as a direct result of their being a victim of modern slavery. It is essential that the police investigate all lines of enquiry when they come across these complicated cases," said Thornton.

Added Ramiz: "While much more research is needed, these accounts of debt bondage and fierce intimidation suggests the mass cultivation of cannabis is rife with modern slavery, and the grey area between offender and victim in these cases can become a blind spot for UK police."

Case study:

A 34-year-old Vietnamese man now in an English prison for growing cannabis told researchers he had been a taxi driver, before fleeing his home after taking part in protests against a Chinese oil rig in the disputed South China sea.

Accused of betraying his country by police, he entered into contract with a smuggler after fearing for his life when a friend disappeared following arrest. Unable to pay in full, he ended up in debt bondage to a criminal gang.

Believing he was going to the UK to work in kitchens, the grower found himself in a series of lorries and flights across China and Russia, and taken into Europe via the forests of Poland.

“You have to walk for maybe two, three days… I saw one person had been beaten up… when I turned around he was unconscious… he walked too slow,” the grower told researchers. He believed the person he described had died.

̽��ֱ��grower arrived in the UK in a lorry container. He was eventually taken to a house already full of cannabis plants and shown how to tend them, and given an allowance for food and phone calls home.

“I do not dare leave the house without telling them, because I fear for my life… They told me if I tried to escape they would harm my family,” said the grower.

He remembered police asking some questions about being forced to work, and he had told them. His legal advisor asked no such questions. He did not consider himself a trafficking victim, as he had wanted to come to the UK.

̽��ֱ��police interviewer of the grower was a 33-year-old probationary police officer. He had been given an interview plan, and told researchers he viewed the matter in simple terms: “…you’re interviewing him as a suspect to get a confession, or to get the points across to get the conviction or charge…”.

No trafficking questions were in the officer’s plan, but he asked some anyway based on the grower’s response. ̽��ֱ��officer acknowledged his ignorance of modern slavery legislation to researchers.

A further interview was done by the officer’s supervisor, who was in charge of the investigation. He told researchers the training given to police on slavery – one hour-long session – was insufficient, and until guidance improved they had to rely on instinct.

̽��ֱ��officer-in-charge entered a submission to the National Referral Mechanism – the framework set up in 2009 to ensure victims of trafficking receive help. The NRM returned a decision that the grower had “consented” to the illegal work, so was not a victim, and he was sentenced to prison.

Migrants arrested for tending plants in the flats, houses and attics where cannabis is grown in bulk are often victims of trafficking and 'debt bondage' – yet many are not recognised as such by police, according to a new study.

Big questions remain about how the criminal justice system should ethically manage modern slavery victims who are also illegal immigrants involved in illegal activity

Heather Strang

West Midlands Police

A cannabis setup inside a residential premises in the West Midlands.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Police platform patrols create ‘phantom effect’ that cuts crime in Tube stations

fpjl2 — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 15:02:29 +0000

A massive experiment that deployed regular police patrols on platforms has shown that four 15-minute patrols a day in some of the capital’s most crime-ridden Underground platforms reduced reported crime by 28% in patrolled locations, while it rose 16% on platforms without patrols.

Researchers from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Criminology worked with the British Transport Police (BTP) to conduct the experiment across six months in 2011-2012. ̽��ֱ��findings have been published in the journal Criminology.

̽��ֱ��team identified the 115 London platforms where reported crime was highest. They randomly allocated 57 of these platforms to four daily 'doses' of patrols – two officers on foot for quarter of an hour – four days a week, and compared the effects to the remaining 'untreated' platforms.

Patrolled platforms dropped from 88 crimes in the preceding six months to 63 crimes on the same platforms during the six months of the experiment. In the same time periods, crimes on platforms without regular patrols increased from 64 to 74.

A total of 3,549 calls to police from the platform came from stations without patrols, compared to 2,817 in the stations receiving a policing 'dosage' – a relative difference of 21%.

Researchers also found that patrols on platforms did not simply 'displace' the crimes. Instead, the overall pattern showed crime going down in all parts of the stations – not just on platforms – relative to 'control' stations.

Strikingly, they discovered that the vast majority of reduction in both crime and calls for assistance occurred when these police patrols were absent – some 97% of the measured effect. ̽��ֱ��criminologists have dubbed this the “London Underground paradox”.

“ ̽��ֱ��total crime prevention benefit of police patrols may be greater when they are absent than when they are present,” said study co-author Prof Lawrence Sherman. “In the London Underground experiment we see a huge residual effect of brief appearances by patrolling officers after they leave”

“This phantom effect suggests that crime declines when potential offenders are apprehensive about a possible police presence based on recent patrolling patterns – even when there are no police in the vicinity,” he said.

“In London stations, it may be that more professional kinds of offenders are particularly sensitive to changes in police presence, such as pickpockets and distraction thieves.”

“ ̽��ֱ��London Underground paradox could have implications for debates on police priorities in an age of austerity, such as the benefits of investigating past crimes compared with the benefits of preventing future crimes,” Sherman said.

London’s Underground opened in 1863, the first underground railway in the world, and provides more than 1.3 billion passenger rides per year.

̽��ֱ��majority of crime in the transport network occurs on the trains and in concourse areas. Crime on platforms constitute 11% of the total, and historically platforms have had no regular police patrols.

As such, platforms offered an opportunity to conduct an experiment on spaces within a major metropolis that had never seen proactive police presence – ideal for gauging patrol effectiveness without previous 'contamination', say researchers.

“Platforms are small, stable and confined places with finite entry and exit points. These characteristics make them optimal for measuring the localised deterrence effects of police patrols,” said first author Dr Barak Ariel.

“We wanted to measure what happens when police patrols are introduced into an urban environment for the first time in over 150 years.”

̽��ֱ��team targeted 'hot spots' – areas where crime is more concentrated, and preventative patrols can have greatest effect – by ranking stations based on the previous year’s crime rates, and including the top 115 of Greater London’s 270 stations in the experiment.

Researchers also narrowed the experiment’s focus based on 'hot hours' and 'hot days'. Previous data showed the sample platforms experienced more crime and calls to police from Wednesday to Saturday between 3pm and 10pm.

Twenty uniformed BTP officers were selected and trained to work exclusively on patrolling the platforms of the 'treatment' stations during 'hot' days and hours. Each two-person unit was allocated between three and five stations, with platforms patrolled for 15 minutes four times a day.

Officers were asked to conduct these patrols in a random or unpredictable order within the 'hot hours', and encouraged to engage with the public while patrolling.

Police were most effective at preventing platform crime during periods and days when patrols were scheduled – but just 3% of that reduction came when officers were actually scheduled to patrol.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found 'regional' effects: crime in the rest of the station fell almost as much as crime on platforms during the four days when regular patrols were deployed.

“Our findings indicate that consistent patrols can cause large reductions in both crime and emergency calls in areas that have never before been proactively patrolled by police in this way,” added Sherman.

“ ̽��ֱ��more that uniformed police have been there, and the more recently, the less likely future crimes may be to occur.”

This story was amended on 17/01/20 to include additional details from the paper on reductions in crime.

A major experiment introducing proactive policing to Underground platforms finds that short bursts of patrolling create a 'phantom effect': 97% of the resulting crime reduction was during periods when police weren’t actually present.

̽��ֱ��London Underground paradox could have implications for debates on police priorities in an age of austerity

Lawrence Sherman

Marco Chilese

London Tube station

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Police officers learn new methods on ̽��ֱ�� course

ps748 — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 09:33:16 +0000

They’re the first tranche of police officers to take part in the ̽��ֱ��'s Senior Leader Master's Degree Apprenticeship Degree course in Applied Criminology and Police Management. Over the next two years they’ll study latest innovations and discoveries in evidence based policing and exchange ideas about how to improve policing in their own agencies.

Noel McHugh is a Detective Chief Inspector with the Metropolitan Police:

“It’s been like doing a marathon mentally. It’s been exhausting, but fascinating because of what we’ve learned. It’s been exciting too because you see how you can apply things to policing and what we can do, especially around knife crime. There are so many ideas going around about what we can do in the future.”

̽��ֱ��course is funded through the government’s Apprenticeship Levy, which, in an era of tight police budgets, has been a godsend. Employers who spend more than £3 million a year on salaries, pay half of one per cent of their pay bill into the Levy and this is used to fund extra training needs. ̽��ֱ��officers will assemble in Cambridge for 2 weeks, three times a year. They will write four 3000 word essays, including a critique of a major piece of research before they set to work on their one year dissertation project.

Ahenkora Bediako, is a Detective Inspector with the Metropolitan Police and has been tackling organised crime for 13 years:

“What I like about what I’m learning here is that it’s directly applicable to policing. In policing, we definitely focus on learning by experience and that’s what we value the most but experience is not necessarily the best way of deciding how to do things and that’s what I’ve learned here. Also what I like is that everyone here is passionate about problems and issues and the real stories behind what we’re doing, so there’s a real meaning to that. We’re not just coming to get a Cambridge degree, we’re actually coming to try to make things better.”

Evidence based policing is the practice of applying research to decision making in policing. It’s recently been used in research where knife attack data has been analysed to predict where fatal knife attacks could occur in the future.

Phaedra Binns, is a Manager in the Counter-Terrorism Unit at Thames Valley Police:

“For me personally, you come away and you look at something like the knife crime predictive probability of an incident occurring. That’s something that, for me, is absolutely fascinating and that we can take away and potentially replicate. So now I’m personally motivated to go away and research that and see what’s being done, what’s effective, what we’re currently doing in the force and how we might do it better.”

Professor Sherman taking a class

Professor Lawrence Sherman, Chair of the Police Executive Programme, says:

“I have urged the student apprentices to view the apprenticeship not only as a means of transforming their own capability to protect the public, but also as an asset for the transformation of their entire police agencies.”

̽��ֱ��student apprentices are overwhelmingly from state schools and come from all over England. After the first two weeks, they’ve already been won over by the benefits higher education can offer for policing.

DCI Noel McHugh again:

“It’s really difficult, but my advice to the young people I work with out there, on the estates and that, is that there’s no reason why they can’t come to Cambridge. They should be aiming to get here because education really is empowering. If I can get through, then there’s hope for them”

For more information on the course go to: crim.cam.ac.uk/Courses/mst-courses or ice.cam.ac.uk/course/mst-applied-criminology-and-police-management-senior-leaders-masters-degree-apprenticeship

Some of the officers in the room are involved in counter-terrorism initiatives. Others tackle organised crime, or prevention of street violence, or safeguarding domestic abuse victims. All have risen through the ranks despite a good proportion of them having no prior experience of university. And now they’re sitting in a lecture theatre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge embarking on a new apprenticeship degree course at the Institute of Criminology: 60 new apprentices for the Institute's 60th anniversary year.

We're not just coming to get a Cambridge degree, we're actually coming to try to make things better

Ahenkora Bediako

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge/Paul Seagrove

Group photo of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's first apprentices

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Knife crime: assault data can help forecast fatal stabbings

fpjl2 — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:23:41 +0000

Knife crime data from a 12-month period could be used to help forecast the London neighbourhoods most likely to suffer a fatal stabbing the following year, according to latest research.

Human smugglers operate as ‘independent traders’, study finds

fpjl2 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:59:42 +0000

Latest research shows a lack of overarching coordination or the involvement of any “kingpin”-style monopolies in the criminal operations illegally transporting people from the Horn of Africa into Northern Europe via Libya.

Instead, transnational smuggling routes were found to be highly segmented: each stage a competitive marketplace of “independent and autonomous” smugglers – as well as militias and kidnappers – that must be negotiated by migrants fighting for a life beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

̽��ֱ��first “network analysis” of this booming criminal enterprise suggests that successful smugglers need a reputation among migrants – and that removing any individual smuggler will only result in rivals immediately seizing their “market share”.

Dr Paolo Campana from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Criminology conducted the research using evidence from the 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors that followed the Lampedusa shipwreck, in which 366 people lost their lives.

̽��ֱ��work included data from wiretapped telephone conversations between smugglers at all stages, testimonies collected from migrants, interviews with police task force members, and background information on offenders.

“ ̽��ֱ��smuggling ring moving migrants from the Horn of Africa to Northern Europe via Libya does not appear to have the thread of any single organisation running through it,” said Campana, whose findings are published today in the European Journal of Criminology.

“This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate, and a major departure from media reports claiming that shadowy kingpins monopolise certain routes.”

In fact, it was the Anti-Mafia unit with the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office initially tasked with investigating smuggling operations on both sides of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Lampedusa disaster in October 2013.

Campana points out that they found no evidence of any involvement from the Sicilian Mafia at the time, even through payment of protection money – despite Sicily being a key stage in the smuggling route.

̽��ֱ��two indictments prepared by the Palermo unit – totalling some 800 pages – formed a major part of the dataset Campana combed through to code all possible data points: references to times, names, events, exchanges, locations and so on.

Overall, 292 actors (not including migrants) were identified as part of the Lampedusa smuggling ring. 95% were male smugglers operating along the main route, from the Horn of Africa to the Nordic nations in northern Europe – where many migrants hoped to find refuge – via Libya and Italy.

However, the network also extended to Dubai, Israel, Canada, Turkey, Germany and the UK, and included those who kidnap for ransom in the deserts of Libya, and Tripoli militiamen who take bribes to let migrants out of detention centres.

“People specialise,” said Campana. “There was a clear separation between those providing smuggling services, those kidnapping for ransom, and those, like the militias, ‘governing’ spaces and supplying protection.”

He also detected signs of rudimentary hierarchy among smugglers in some stages of the route, which roughly divide into ‘organiser’ and ‘aide’.

“Organisers are individuals who give orders but don’t receive them, while aides are highly dependent on organisers for their activities. Organisers make up some 15% of the smuggling network and the remaining 85% occupy a lower ranking aide position.”

̽��ֱ��network models built by Campana show that those who operate in the same stage of the journey are almost seven times more likely to have some link with each other. “Even in a network that traverses the hemispheres, it is the local dimension that is still crucial,” he said.

Moreover, Campana found that those who share the same network position as either organiser or aide are three times less likely to have any tie. “There is little contact between fellow organisers, reinforcing the impression of smugglers as free-trading independents. Business opportunities tear coordination apart,” he said.

Indeed, a focused analysis of a sub-network of 28 smugglers revealed that those based in Italy who tapped directly into the Libyan ‘marketplace’ had very little contact with each other.

Wiretaps and testimonials suggest that migrants have to pay separate vendors for each leg of the journey. Payment was often done in advance though Hawala, an informal money transfer system based on trust.

One wiretap reveals a charge of $3600 for a couple to cross the Mediterranean. Another wiretapped smuggler charges €150 per person for a car trip from Sicily to Rome.

“Reputation is crucial in a competitive market, and the wiretaps show how much value smugglers place on their reputation,” said Campana.

One smuggler was recorded reproaching another for overcrowding a boat, comparing it to the way a dirty bathroom reflects badly on everyone who shares the house.

In fact, the wiretaps reveal that the loss of life in the Lampedusa disaster led to compensation being paid to families by smugglers scared of losing future business.

“Authorities may wish to deliberately tarnish the reputation of smugglers in order to shut down their business,” said Campana.

“Criminal justice responses require the adoption of coordinated tactics involving all countries along the route to target these localised clusters of offenders simultaneously.

“This is a market driven by exponential demand, and it is that demand which should be targeted. Land-based policies such as refugee resettlement schemes are politically difficult, but might ultimately prove more fruitful in stemming the smuggling tide than naval operations.”

First study to model the organisation behind trade in illegal border crossings shows no “Mafia-like” monopoly of routes from Africa into Europe via Mediterranean. Instead, myriad independent smugglers compete in open markets that have emerged at every stage of the journey.

This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate

Paolo Campana

Noborder Network

Migrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Domestic abuse ‘workshops’ reduce repeat offending and harm to public – study

fpjl2 — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:15:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��first domestic abuse policing strategy in UK history to be trialled under experimental conditions has shown that an inexpensive two-day course in behaviour management for first offenders resulted in 35% fewer men reoffending against their partner, and reduced further harm to victims by over a quarter.

Researchers at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Criminology worked with Hampshire Constabulary to conduct the study using the recently developed CARA (Cautions and Relationship Abuse) programme: small-group discussion workshops for men who received conditional cautions for first arrests for low-harm domestic abuse.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that, in just this initial study of hundreds of Southampton-area offenders over a 12-month period, the CARA programme prevented significant harm to victims, hundreds of prison days, and consequently saved thousands of pounds.

̽��ֱ��findings are published in full in this week’s print edition of the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing.

̽��ֱ��team behind the study say that several police forces want to replicate the use of the CARA course, developed by the Hampton Trust domestic abuse charity. However, they say that current guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service restricts the use of conditional cautions for domestic abuse across the country.

“Dealing with high volumes of low-harm common assault cases against intimate partners is a significant issue for police forces across the UK, particularly in times of continued austerity,” said study lead author Professor Heather Strang, Director of Research at Cambridge’s Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology.

“No other programme to our knowledge now has such strong evidence of yielding a substantial reduction in harm to victims of domestic abuse.

“ ̽��ֱ��CARA programme should be approved for general use with low-harm first offenders, preferably with further randomised trials to ensure it works for different communities across England and Wales.”

̽��ֱ��study only involved adult men who admitted their offence, were not judged ‘high risk’, and had no record of any violence in the preceding two years. All victims agreed to their partners’ participation.

To be eligible for the experiment, the offence had to be classified as either common assault/battery, criminal damage, harassment, threatening behaviour, or domestic theft.

Of the 293 offenders who fit the strict criteria between August 2012 and November 2015, around half were randomly assigned to attend CARA workshops, run by experienced facilitators from the Southampton-based Hampton Trust.

̽��ֱ��CARA programme consists of two five-hour group discussions of between four and seven men, held on weekends one month apart, in which facilitators raise questions that cause attendees to reflect upon their behaviour and how they might change it.

Offenders in the other half, the control group, were given ‘conditional cautions’: meaning any repeat offence within four months would see prosecution in court. This is a commonly deployed police response to first arrests for low-harm domestic abuse.

Professor Strang and colleagues – including several Hampshire police leaders enrolled on the Cambridge Police Executive Programme – followed up with offenders a year after the first arrest. They found that 35% fewer men in the CARA group had committed any further offence against their partner.

However, Cambridge co-author Professor Lawrence Sherman describes such simplistic ‘crime counts’ as unhelpful when determining the real cost of crime: harm caused to victims. “ ̽��ֱ��key result for the team came when we analysed all reoffending in both groups using the Cambridge Crime Harm Index,” he said.

This Harm Index, or CCHI, is a new tool that measures harm by weighting the severity of each crime in sentencing guidelines for different offences, rather than just totting up overall crime figures. ̽��ֱ��Office of National Statistics credits the CCHI as the stimulus for its own (modified) version of a harm index, introduced earlier this year.

Overall, those in the CARA group caused 27% less harm per offender to their partners than the control group.

Using the CCHI, the team calculated that the recommended number of prison days under English sentencing guidelines for reoffenders in the year following the first arrest was an average of 8.4 days for the CARA attendees, compared to an average of 11.6 days for offenders not sent to CARA.

“This would mean that, for every thousand first time offenders sent to CARA workshops, 380 days of recommended imprisonment would be saved, and victims would be spared the inflicted harm equivalent to 380 common assaults, or 19 assaults with actual bodily harm,” said Sherman.

Men who participated in the CARA workshops described having a greater understanding of the impact of their behaviour on partners and children, and when to walk away from a fight. Some talked of going on to attend support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous as a result.

Chantal Hughes, Chief Executive of the Hampton Trust, said: "We know from consultations with victims that they want help for their partners. Those choosing not to remain in an intimate relationship often have children, and this means child contact arrangements. Victims have advised us that workshops such as CARA are a positive and much needed intervention."

Study co-author Scott Chilton, Assistant Chief Constable of Hampshire Police and Chair of the Society of Evidence Based Policing, said: “CARA is an outstanding example of evidence based innovation that can influence national police policy and practices.

“This type of research, where professionals from law enforcement work with academia and charitable organisations, has proved to be extremely promising.”

First UK experiment on policing domestic abuse finds fewer men reoffending against partners – and reoffenders causing less harm to victims – when mandated to attend charity-run discussion course. Researchers call on Government to approve rollout of programme across England and Wales.

No other programme to our knowledge now has such strong evidence of yielding a substantial reduction in harm to victims of domestic abuse

Heather Strang

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Head in hands

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Trading on human tides – the 'free market' of people smuggling

fpjl2 — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:30:47 +0000

A wiretapped telephone records a human smuggler in Sudan asking a human smuggler in Libya how many were his. ̽��ֱ��response is 109, of whom 68 are now dead.

̽��ֱ��boat had capsized within sight of the Italian island of Lampedusa, killing 366 people. At the time, autumn 2013, it was the single largest loss of life to result from the booming black market in Mediterranean crossings. Worse would follow.

̽��ֱ��wiretap later records the smuggler in Sudan reproaching the smuggler in Libya for overcrowding the boat. He has since felt obliged to personally notify families. He has shelled out $5,000 in compensation in a bid to save his reputation and stop potential customers turning to one of his many rivals.

Human smuggling is different to human trafficking: the smugglers’ commodity is the crossing of borders rather than control over people – and war, poverty and globalisation have caused demand for this commodity to explode.

Between 2014 and 2015, illegal border crossings along the East Mediterranean route increased by an astonishing 1,641%: from around 50,000 to over 885,000. As with any market, let alone one of the fastest growing on the planet, where fortunes are to be made competition is ferocious.

Dr Paolo Campana, an expert in criminal networks, joined Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology in early 2015. He describes the commerce of smuggling humans into Europe as a “quintessential free market”, with little intervention and no regulation beyond the market’s own mechanisms.

“Some smugglers cheat, some overcharge, some care about safety, some don’t care who lives or dies. Some offer ‘premium’ services, fast-tracking migrants through smuggling routes. Some don’t protect people from kidnappers, others help buy them back from militias,” he says.

“ ̽��ֱ��law struggles to apprehend smugglers, and when they do manage it, any void created is likely to be immediately filled. ̽��ֱ��main things that stop smugglers defrauding many more migrants, or drowning them in unseaworthy boats, are individual morality and maintaining a reputation that attracts more business.”

No 'Mr Big'

Importantly for a pure free market such as human smuggling, there are no monopolies, says Campana. While newspaper headlines will often describe ‘Mr Big’ figures or talk of Mafia involvement, his research shows that smuggling networks are fragmented: small groups with rudimentary hierarchies jostling for trade in crowded marketplaces.

“Despite smuggling routes traversing the globe, from the Horn of Africa to Scandinavia, individual operations are stunted and localised – nobody is in control of all stages of the journey. Smugglers operate as independent actors in various stages of an overall journey, whether it’s a sea or a desert crossing, or temporary city accommodation, or car trips over European borders.”

“While some smuggling groups make arrangements with each other, there seem to be no exclusivity agreements and – despite the localisation of smuggling networks – very little territorial control,” says Campana.

This absence of monopolies is radically different to other black markets such as Mafia-like protection rackets. Even in Sicily, where both human smuggling and the Mafia are major problems, Campana observed no connection between the two.

Almost anyone can set themselves up as a smuggler: from street vendors who sell border crossings as a sideline, to tour guides who switch to smuggling, to fishermen who are already equipped with boats for the sea crossings. It is the free-for-all nature of this marketplace that gives it the flexibility to expand quickly and accommodate soaring demand.

“Human smuggling is an enterprise with low barriers to entry, low skills and relatively low capital requirements – yet it has the potential to be far more lucrative than most other occupations available to people on the smuggling routes.”

As one operational analyst from the European border agency Frontex told Campana: “If you carry 20 people in a boat, that could be the equivalent of five years’ bad fishing.”

In the wake of the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck, a rescue operation, initially called Operation Mare Nostrum, was set up to patrol the Mediterranean, and resources from the highly skilled anti-Mafia prosecution unit in Palermo were allocated to tracking human smuggling operations for the first time.

Campana combed through and coded the smuggling court cases and wiretapped evidence that resulted from this shift, and has created quantitative databases to model smuggling networks.

As well as interviewing the Frontex analysts in Warsaw, he has also travelled to small towns in Greece and some of the Italian islands to speak to migrants, the police and the local communities.

He has just started to publish the findings from this research, including an overview of the new smuggling markets. He hopes that the first quantitative network analysis of a human smuggling operation – the one involved in the Lampedusa disaster – will also be public later this year.

Attracting customers online

Campana is also working with his Institute of Criminology colleague Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, who has worked for many years with victims of trafficking, to conduct further interviews to capture the voices and experiences of migrants and smugglers. Gelsthorpe is co-founder of the Cambridge Migration Research Network, CAMMIGRES, which aims to improve understanding of migration.

“Professor Gelsthorpe and I are taking a genuinely holistic approach by combining the data-driven with the experiential,” says Campana.

One of the key areas the researchers are exploring is how migrants choose who to trust in such a busy and dangerous marketplace. This comes back to reputation.

While some smuggling networks are organised around ethnic lines, and word of mouth is important, digital forums have become increasingly influential in establishing trustworthiness, so part of the research involves analysing social media.

Smugglers often advertise their services in Facebook groups, where they try to attract ‘customers’ by responding to queries, competing through prices, and promoting credentials in the form of recommendations from other migrants.

Payment happens in advance, often through hawala, a traditional honour system that now functions through text messaging and a vast network of brokers. In some ways these platforms and processes are not that different to using eBay, for example, but with far more at stake.

Online networks are particularly significant in Syrian communities, where there is on average a higher level of education and digital literacy. “As everywhere, education matters,” says Campana. “Accessing and evaluating information through channels such as Facebook could mean the difference between life and death.”

Campana’s research has led him to question the European Union’s focus on policing and naval operations in the Mediterranean to control human smuggling. “Naval operations are very noble; however, they have the unintended consequence of assisting the smugglers by taking the refugees off their hands very close to the Libyan coast – making the ‘product’ more attractive and, ultimately, increasing the number of journeys.

Inset: Syrian and Iraqi immigrants getting off a boat from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos. Credit: Ggia (CC: BY-SA)

Cambridge criminologists are using emerging sources of information – from court records to Facebook groups – to analyse the networks behind one of the fastest-growing black markets on the planet: the smuggling of people into Europe.

Some smugglers cheat, some overcharge, some care about safety, some don’t care who lives or dies

Paolo Campana

Mstyslav Chernov

Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016

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