Guide

Facilitating Conditions

Crime facilitators help offenders commit crimes, due to their capacity to blunt crime prevention. Evidence about facilitators can be found in investigative reports and from investigators, by interviewing victims and offenders, and by observing social situations. For the parameter FACILITATING CONDITIONS we set 5 parameters, which can of course be extended:

1. Physical facilitators are things that augment offenders’ capabilities or help to overcome prevention measures. Internet allows ISIS to motivate vulnerable individuals, like telephones allow people to make obscene phone calls, cars can be used in terror attacks when protective barriers are not in place and paving stones can be transformed in weapons against the police for rioters. Physical facilitators can be legitimate (like the chat used by the young Kermisch to plan the attack in Rouen) or illegitimate (like the truck stolen by Anis Amri in Berlin). Some physical facilitators are tools, but others are part of the physical environment.
2. Social facilitators stimulate crime or disorder by enhancing rewards from crime, legitimating excuses to offend, or by encouraging offending. Gangs provide the social support for crime, for example, like abandoned facilities occupied by marginal groups of occupiers can provide the social atmosphere that encourages rowdy behaviours.
3. Chemical facilitators increase offenders’ abilities to ignore risks or moral prohibitions. Studies shown that a number of foreign terrorist fighters, for example, used synthetic drugs to carry out their massacres. In other cases, drink heavily or use drugs before a crime is a strategy to decrease their nervousness. The nexus drug-crime is a key topic far beyond pretty crimes.
4. Institutional facilitators are individuals or organisations which voluntarily or involuntarily support mafia group and terrorism. Police can facilitate violent escalations when they overreact as response to provocations. Government can also facilitate crime, when they adopt legislations which decrease the risks for potential perpetrators or take wrong security decisions.
5. Media Facilitators can favour terrorism and crime, for example, when they over-report criminal cases, thus supporting lone wolfs to achieve their main goal, which is fear. Media can also be part of the cyberwar and, voluntarily or involuntarily, become of weapon in the hands of proxies or competing forces.