Guide

Be very crime specific: from ‘why’ to ‘how’

Terrorism and organised crime are complex latent phenomena which permeate all societies in different ways and degrees, in the form of permanent and constantly changing threats. No society is exempt, just as no society is free from criminal phenomena in the broad sense.

The major difficulty in contemporary prevention policies is to understand which policy and practice models are effective, sustainable and measurable with respect to the diverse phenomena of emerging terrorism and organised crime.

The starting point of the ‘Cube’ is that in reality, behind these terms of ‘terrorism’ and ‘organised crime’, there are a myriad of crimes, often very different from each other.

NON-TERROR ATTACKS: On 1 October 2017, Stephen Paddock, an avid gambler, murdered 58 people in Las Vegas and wounded another 546 with a series of automatic weapons firing on a concert from the windows of an adjacent hotel. When the police intervened, he committed suicide. The 64-year-old Paddock fired 1100 shots and had another 4000 in reserve, as well as 23 different weapons. The motivations of his act are not clear. His is not considered a case of terrorism, as 90% of cases have seen about 400 deaths per year killed in automatic weapon attacks in the United States.[1]

TERROR ATTACKS: The massacre of 49 people and the wounding of another 58 committed by Omar Mateen, a 49-year-old security guard, at an Orlando night club in June 2016, was considered an act of terrorism; again, the crime was committed with an assault rifle and a pistol. The attack that began as an active shooter incident transitioned into a barricaded suspect with hostage’s incident and ended as the second deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. Also Mateen died, killed by the police, following the attack. Mateen was not on an official terrorism watch list and was able to legally hold a state firearms licence, according to Florida records because he had worked as an armed security officer for the firm G4S since 2007. Mateen was a Muslim, although he did not practice his faith.

From this comparative example we understand how the definition of these phenomena has a strong ideological component, which drags us into endless discussions every time we try to define them.

The discussion about what is ‘terrorist’ or ‘mafia’ or, even worse, ‘radical’, ‘extremist’ is certainly useful to frame the aims of crimes, and therefore to define the relevant legal framework. But in many cases, such discussions are sterile, when not counterproductive, compared to the ability to anticipate future events, which is instead the purpose of prevention.

Similarly, adopting anti-mafia models in cases of normal crime, as happened with the case of ‘Mafia Capitale’ in Rome in 2017, can lead to serious judicial defeats that threaten to undermine the credibility of the judiciary and jeopardise complex investigations.

Another useful category as an alternative to terrorism, for example, could be that of ‘mass shootings’. If we analyse cases such as the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, California, in 2015 and in Brussels, Belgium, in 2016; mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and Charleston, South Carolina, in 2016; and the terrorist attacks in early summer 2017 in Manchester and London, England, where different persons and groups motivated by a variety of ideological, political, or individual factors represent a growing threat to our and other nations’ security[2].

Choosing the ‘mass shooting’ category instead of terrorism, to continue the example (or organised drug trafficking instead of the more generic organised crime) means shifting the focus from motivation to methods, from why to how.

The Cube Model, therefore, does not focus on dissimilar phenomena, even if apparently catalogued (or not catalogued) under the common macro-labels of terrorism and organised crime, but on models which aggregate acts similar in their execution, in their phenomenology.

The crimes listed under these macro-categories, such as terrorism or mafia, are of a diverse nature, as the new European directive on terrorism makes clear[3], offering us one of the most complete lists of these types of offences:

(a) attacks upon a person’s life which may cause death;

(b) attacks upon the physical integrity of a person;

(c) kidnapping or hostage-taking;

(d) causing extensive destruction to a government or public facility, a transport system, an infrastructure facility, including an information system, a fixed platform located on the continental shelf, a public place or private property likely to endanger human life or result in major economic loss;

(e) seizure of aircraft, ships or other means of public or goods transport;

(f) manufacture, possession, acquisition, transport, supply or use of explosives or weapons, including chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, as well as research into, and development of, chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons;

(g) release of dangerous substances, or causing fires, floods or explosions, the effect of which is to endanger human life;

(h) interfering with or disrupting the supply of water, power or any other fundamental natural resource, the effect of which is to endanger human life;

(i) illegal system interference, ….

(j) threatening to commit any of the acts listed in points (a) to (i).

2. The aims referred to in paragraph 1 are:

(a) seriously intimidating a population;

(b) unduly compelling a government or an international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act;

(c) seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation.

For organised crime, an appropriate list is the one defined by the offences established in accordance with articles 5, 6, 8 and 23 of the Palermo Convention. Unfortunately, also these lists of an institutional nature and with a strong legislative aspect are not complete; they are only partially useful for the purposes of our analysis aimed at prevention, which is centred on how the crimes were committed for cataloguing and comparing purposes. Therefore, we must delve a little deeper into specific aspects in order to identify targeted solutions.

As Roberta Belli and Joshua Freilich wrote, “what has meaning for the law might be irrelevant for prevention purposes”[4]. In fact, for the purpose of a targeted and reformed situational prevention, which is precisely one of the goals of the ‘Cube Model’, we do not see decisive aspects of a common modus operandi in these crimes.

On 22 March 2017, Khalid Masood carried out a car attack in Westminster, killing four people and wounding 50 others. When his car collided with the Westminster Palace protection barriers, Masood got out and stabbed an unarmed New Palace Yard policeman to death.

From January 7 to January 9, 2015, a total of 17 people were killed in attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a kosher grocery store, and the Paris suburb of Montrouge. Three suspects in the attacks were killed by police in separate standoffs. They used assault rifles and homemade explosives.

These examples, chosen among the many unfortunately available, show how for the ‘Cube’, the traditional or judiciary categories are too broad. They include too many different kinds of crimes, all of which need to be separately analysed in their modus operandi. These crimes are committed for a variety of reasons, within different environments, by different offenders, with varying degrees of organisation, knowledge, skills and weapons, as shown by the examples above.

So far, crime has been classified in terms of responses to terrorism or organized crime and why perpetrators committed their crimes. Unlike to these common methodologies, our approach wants to know how crimes have been successfully committed. For example, ‘terrorism’ could include a detailed categorisation far beyond ‘mass shootings’ or ‘terror acts’, such as:

Each of these cases can be further segmented into sub-phenomena, in order to establish different operating modes and parallel scenarios. This is a very important preliminary activities to establish evidence-based and comparative preventive operations.

The transition from WHY to HOW opens up unprecedented prevention perspectives for the security policies. Let us consider the proposed example again: activating a strategy of reduction of the weapons in circulation can be considered a valid harm reduction measure in some of the cases mentioned, for example in the US, where weapons are freely available and are always at the centre of mass shootings (or terrorist acts). But it would be of little use in the case of attacks with knives or vehicles, such as cars, aircraft or other dual means, such as home-made explosives, which are indeed the most recurrent in Europe, where arms control is rigorous and therefore prevention measures have produced an effect that SCP defines as ‘displacement‘. In these European cases, therefore, harm reduction measures must be structured differently. The modalities of the criminal acts are essential to define preventive strategies.

In addition to the purpose of the preventive response, the analysis of the modus operandi is strategic also for the analysis. As can be understood from the cases summarily mentioned, for example, the type of weapons used is very important, as it implies a specific logistic, and is closely linked to the choice of targets and the capabilities of the motivated perpetrators.

In this sense, the TAKEDOWN toolkit, by means of exercises with the Cube Model, could be considered an extension of the great research work done by the University of New York’s POP Centre with its 74 problem specific guides[5].

Center for Problem-Oriented Policing

The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing has the mission to advance the concept and practice of problem-oriented policing in open and democratic societies. It does so by making readily accessible information about ways in which police can more effectively address specific crime and disorder problems. Launched in 2003 the POP Center web site has provided innovative learning experiences, curriculum guides, teaching aids, problem analysis tools, and an immense range of information to its users. Since the publication of the first POP Guide in 2001 over 900,000 copies of the POP guides and other POP Center publications have been distributed by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) to individuals and agencies throughout the world. POP Center materials are also widely used in police training and college courses. Among the many ongoing accomplishments of the POP Center the Problem-Specific Guides for Police summarize knowledge about how police can reduce the harm caused by specific crime and disorder problems. Each guide is informed by a thorough review of the research literature and reported police practice, and each guide is anonymously peer-reviewed by a line police officer, a police executive and a researcher prior to publication. The review process is independently managed by the COPS Office, which solicits the reviews.

[1]  The detailed reconstruction of the Las Vegas attack by the police is available in https://www.scribd.com/document/369538275/1-October-FIT-Report-01-18-2018-Footnoted retrieved on 21/01/2018

[2] Important analysis on these cases, from an SCP perspective, are to be found in Frank Straub, Jack Cambria, Jane Castor, Ben Gorban, Brett Meade, David Waltemeyer, and Jennifer Zeunik, Rescue, Response and Resilience, A critical incident review of the Orlando public safety response to the attack on the Pulse nightclub, Critical Response Initiative, Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2017; Edward F. Davis III, Alejandro A. Alves, and David Alan Sklansky, Social Media and Police Leadership: Lessons from Boston, New Perspectives in Policing Bulletin (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2014), https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/244760.pdf; After Action Report for the Response to the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings (Boston: Massachusetts State Police, 2014), http://www.mass.gov/eopss/docs/mema/afteraction-report-for-the-response-to-the-2013-boston-marathon-bombings.pdf. ¹⁸ Global Terrorism Database, “Incident Summary: 11/13/2015,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, accessed June 3, 2017, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gtdid=201511130008. ¹⁹ Rick Braziel et al., Bringing Calm to Chaos: A Critical Incident Review of the San Bernardino Public Safety Response to the December 2, 2015, Terrorist Shooting Incident at the Inland Regional Center, Critical Response Initiative (Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2016), https://ric-zaiinc.com/ric.php?page=detail&id=COPS-W0808; Frank Straub, Jennifer Zeunik, and Ben Gorban, “Lessons Learned from the Police Response to the San Bernardino and Orlando Terrorist Attacks,” CTC Sentinel 10, no. 5 (May 2017), https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/CTC-Sentinel_Vol10Iss515.pdf. ²⁰ Pieter Van Ostaeyen, “Belgian Radical Networks and the Road to the Brussels Attacks,” CTC Sentinel 9, no. 6 (June 2016), https://ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/CTC-SENTINEL_Vol9Iss613.pdf. ²¹ Greg Myre, “Manchester Bombing Is Europe’s 13th Terrorist Attack Since 2015,” NPR, May 23, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/05/23/529645904/manchester-bombing-is-europes-12th-terroristattack-since-2015.

[3] DIRECTIVE (EU) 2017/541 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 15 March 2017 on combating terrorism and replacing Council Framework Decision 2002/475/JHA and amending  Council Decision 2005/671/JHA

[4] R.Belli and J.D.Freilich, Situational Crime Prevention and non-violent terrorism: A ‘soft’ approach against ideologically motivated tax refusal, in J.D. Freilich and G.R. Newman, Reducing Terrorism, op. cit., pg.183

[5] The updated list of the Guides Is available in http://www.popcenter.org/problems/