Criminals are often specialists in certain crimes, rarely change their field of activity, operate in a small area with local partners and are usually female, report Viennese complexity researchers: “It is therefore worthwhile to invest energy and resources in specialized police units that focus on specific types of crimes.”
A team led by Stefan Thurner from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna analyzed 1.2 million criminal incidents from 581,000 perpetrators. “This corresponds to all criminal charges filed against individuals in a small Central European country over a six-year period,” the researchers explained in a press release.
Data was anonymized
According to the contract with the project partner that temporarily made the anonymized data available, the country concerned cannot be disclosed. According to the trade article, this is the crime analysis department of the Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office.
Offenders who specialize in specific areas of crime during their criminal career tend to be older and more likely to be female than offenders with a broad practice, the researchers said: “These specialists operate in a smaller geographic area, suggesting they have a greater focus on crime. a place and perhaps the support of people there are more dependent than criminals who are not specialized. They also work together in small, close-knit local networks. This increases the chance that they will work with the same partners repeatedly.
A quarter will relapse
According to complexity researchers, of the 581,000 criminals, almost a quarter are guilty more than once. Although women tended to specialize more than men, they made up only 15 percent of repeat offenders overall. “This is consistent with studies from around the world,” they explained. In some areas, such as prostitution, computer crime and environmental crime, specialization is very likely. Here the perpetrators rarely move to other areas. But there are also ‘typical transitions’, the scientists report, for example from election fraud to computer crime, from animal abuse to environmental crime and from corruption to participation in suicide.
This knowledge would help law enforcement agencies better anticipate criminal developments. “Tailored measures in the areas of policing, prevention and rehabilitation could have an even greater impact,” the researchers say.
They classified all criminal complaints from 2015 to 2012 from the anonymous country into 21 categories, such as ‘corruption’ and ‘sexual crimes’. “We then clustered the perpetrators based on the crimes they had committed,” says Georg Heiler (CSH). Sociodemographic information such as age and gender, as well as information on the type and severity of crimes committed and the geographical region in which they occurred, were also included in the analyses. In this way, a “data-based categorization of crimes” could be carried out, in which patterns of criminal behavior could be identified, Thurner explains.
The research was published in the journal ‘Scientific Reports’.
Source: Krone
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