By Matt Herbert and Max Gallien

This report offers a sizing and analysis of the developing trends around drugs in the Maghreb. It begins by detailing the production of narcotics in the Maghreb, including both cannabis and poppies. Next, it focuses on the trafficking of these products, exploring the types of drugs that transit the region, the routes they take and the groups involved in their movement.

The report then looks at drug consumption trends in the Maghreb, before detailing the impacts of narcotics on state capacity, security and public health and ending with brief recommendations.

Geneva: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2020. 65p

By Vanda Felbab-Brown 

This report analyses the landscape of anti-crime militias and vigilante forces in Nigeria’s south over the past 20 years. It focuses on two vigilante groups, tracing their evolution and the anti-crime, security, and political impacts, before providing policy recommendations. The report explains the context of vigilante and anti-crime militia group formation in Nigeria, including the struggles, challenges, and deficiencies of the Nigeria Federal Police. It discusses the evolution of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), its own role in criminality, and the anti-SARS protests. It also provides a historic background of vigilantism in Nigeria and lays out the various sources from which vigilantism in Nigeria stems. It goes on to review the landscape of militia groups in southern Nigeria and outlines their different types, including in terms of formalization and official recognition. It then details the formation, effectiveness, evolution, and anticrime, security, and policy effects of the Bakassi Boys in Nigeria’s South East. It also analyzes 20 years of federal and state policy responses toward them. The following section provides the same analysis for the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) in the South West.

New York: United Nations University, 2021. 67p.

By Francesco Marelli  

The scope of this report is to understand how technology can help to limit the threats posed by organized crime involvement in counterfeiting and food fraud, in particular in relation to the infiltration of counterfeit and fraudulent food into the legitimate supply chain.

The report has been prepared by the UNICRI Knowledge Centre Security through Research, Technology and Innovation (SIRIO). The scope of SIRIO is to analyse and understand the global impacts, opportunities and challenges of technological change, including in the areas of augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR), big data analytics, digital biology and biotech, nanotech and digital printing, networks and computing systems, supply chain security and decentralized technologies such as blockchain.

Torino, Italy: United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), 202o.  195p.

By Sofie Kirt Strandbygaard

  The objective of this thesis is to explore passengers’ experience of fear of crime at S-train stations and the possible relation to the stations’ surrounding environments. The thesis consists of three articles each exploring different layers of the research with the aim of unfolding train passengers’ fear of crime in relation to the built environment. The analysis is based on case studies of 84 S-train stations and their neighbourhoods in the Copenhagen metropolitan area. The S-train is the local rail network in the regional development plan, the Finger Plan. The method of analysis is typomorphological, defining urban types based on their patterns and spatial characteristics. Because the focus is passengers’ experience of fear of crime in public space the spatial analysis is guided by Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design principles. The analysis outlines three main station neighbourhood types and several subcategories of combinations between the three. When compared with passenger surveys of fear of crime at the S-train train stations, the results exhibit a relationship between the types of station neighbourhood form and passengers’ fear of crime at the associated station. When comparing station neighbourhood form with income, the results show that fear of crime at stations is strongly correlated with low income in the station’s neighbourhood. However, a significant research result is that when adjusting for income, passengers’ experience of fear of crime still follows the same type of neighbourhood form. This result underlines the influence of urban spatial characteristics on passengers’ experience of fear of crime. An analysis of thirteen representative S-train stations and their vicinities according to international design guidelines for transit-oriented development (TOD) is performed to look at the urban space surrounding the stations. The analysis reveals that the Finger Plan is a regional public transport-oriented development, however, several of the stations’ surrounding urban areas show a prevailing tendency to neglect the pedestrian design scale and design dimensions related to safety. The thesis’ research results provide knowledge on passengers’ experience of stations. It contributes with perspectives on and insights into S-train stations and their neighbourhoods in Copenhagen and can assist the transport industry in improving passengers’ experience of train stations. Contributions from the research is a CPTED design analysis tool for public transport environments and recommendations for Danish TOD practice. The thesis contributes with novel research results to the existing international body of knowledge on passengers’ fear of crime at train stations.   

 Lyngby. Denmark: Department of Civil Engineering Technical University of Denmark. 2019. 206p.  

By Vania Ceccato · Nathan Gaudelet · Gabin Graf  

  This article reviews five decades of English and French literature on transit safety in several major databases, with the focus on Scopus and ScienceDirect. The review explores the nature and frequency of transit crime and passengers’ safety perceptions in transport nodes and along the trip using bibliometric analysis and a systematic review of the literature. The number of retrieved documents was 3137, and 245 were selected for in-depth analysis. Transit safety as a research area took off after the mid-1990s and peaked after the 2010s. The body of research is dominated by the English-language literature (mostly large cities), with a focus on the safety of rail-bound environments and examples of interventions to improve actual and perceived safety for public transportation (PT) users. Highlighting the importance of transit environments along the whole trip, the article also helps advocate for more inclusion of passengers’ safety needs and the involvement of multiple stakeholders in implementing PT policies.

Public Transport,  2022. Vol. 14, no 1, p. 105-153

By Daniel J. Flannery

In response to an extended, alarming increase in heroin-involved overdose deaths in the county, in 2013 the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office (CCMEO) and Regional Forensic Science Laboratory developed the Heroin Involved Death Investigation (HIDI) alert system and protocol. The HIDI protocol initiates and governs Heroin Early Alert (HEAT) emails sent by the CCMEO. These alerts give notice that the CCMEO has learned of 1) an active suspected opioid overdose via a death scene presenting physical evidence of opioid misuse or through evidence provided by family/friends or medical personnel regarding the victim’s history of drug misuse or a suspected opioid overdose death occurring at a hospital (what the alert identifies as “not an active scene”). Alerts are provided to professionals in the region’s public health and hospital systems and agencies that include the Cleveland Division of Police (CPD), County Sheriff’s Department, and other county and federal agencies that investigate and prosecute major drug traffickers. The HIDI protocol governs chain of custody and laboratory testing submissions of evidence items found on the body at the scene. The HIDI protocol is designed to support a safe, coordinated, and rapid response to an active scene by alerting investigators to potential dangers (lethal drugs) and facilitating the timely protection of the scene and collection of evidence. The primary goal of this protocol is to connect the victim (drug buyer) to the seller, with a focus on mid-level dealers and major traffickers. This report concludes with a discussion of the implications of this protocol for criminal justice practice and policy in investigative drug law enforcement, as well as the use of investigative evidence in the building of a case for prosecution.

Cleveland, OH: Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education.  2022. 222p.

By Kyle Johnson

  Tumaco is a municipality in south-west Colombia, close to the border with Ecuador. The city, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, has become a vital hub for non-state armed groups, including transnational drug trafficking networks and former guerrillas, owing to its port and location. Several armed groups, including ex-FARC dissidents,1 have established a permanent presence in several low-income neighbourhoods, with significant consequences for the inhabitants and local governance. This case study examines criminal governance during the pandemic of three groups based in Tumaco: the Alfonso Cano Western Bloc (BOAC), the United Guerrillas of the Pacific (GUP) and the Contadores (Accountants). The BOAC actively adopted measures to respond to the pandemic, imposing curfews, restricting people’s movements and banning outsiders from entering areas under its control. Despite claims that it had yielded its role in governance issues to local community boards, the group continued to wield influence over the local population and provide services such as dispute resolution. By contrast, the GUP did not impose any pandemic-related restrictions, and some members expressed views that the virus was not real, directly contradicting the Colombian government’s stance. This resonated with many in Tumaco, who also believed the pandemic was not a serious threat. This lack of action may, however, also have been tied to leadership and discipline issues. The release of two prominent commanders from prison destabilized the group’s hierarchy, impacting governance patterns and gang organization. Members started to charge the community high prices for services such as dispute resolution, which the population could not afford, and were reported as being unpredictably violent. These two commanders then defected to the BOAC and the Contadores, along with their fighters. The Contadores then ‘inherited’ the GUP areas. Criminal governance also impacted people’s adherence to COVID-related restrictions. In the few areas where restrictions were imposed by crime groups, these rules were more widely respected than those imposed by the local or national governments, mainly due to the implied and sometimes explicit threats accompanying armed groups’ regulation and the authorities’ inability to enforce restrictions.   

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021. 18p.

By Camilo Nieto-Matiz

  Modern states are selective and calculating in their decision to establish their rule throughout the territory. Within the same country, state officials may be willing and capable of making major efforts to deliver public goods and provide security to the population in some areas, while choosing to neglect others and delegate their control to different actors. This dissertation studies why and how political elites differentially build state capacity in peripheral and marginalized areas of a country and in the midst of violent conflicts. What drives incumbents to increase state capacity in peripheral and marginalized areas within a country? What type of state expansion is likely to take place in such areas? My central argument is that exogenous shocks that suddenly increase the political and economic value of peripheral areas may prompt incumbents to invest in state capacity, but whether this capacity increases or not depends on the preexisting configuration of violent actors and local rural elites. On the one hand, the type of violent actor—threatening and non-threatening—exerts a differential effect on state capacity by (i) shaping subnational politicians’ incentives to cooperate with the central state and (ii) establishing collusive agreements with violent actors. In addition, because greater state capacity tends to undermine rural elites’ economic and political power, they will have incentives to oppose greater state presence and—in contexts  of insecurity and violence—establish alliances with non-threatening groups. In short, state capacity is likely to be higher in municipalities with weak rural elites and facing threatening violent groups. In contrast, state capacity will be more difficult to attain in areas with stronger rural elites and where violent groups do not pose a major threat to state authority....

Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame, 2020. 231p.

By Andre Mancha

I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities’ surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto theft. Starting in 2014, many municipalities in Brazil increased the monitoring of spare parts sold by junkyards through new regulations at the state level.

I show that levels of auto theft dropped significantly after the introduction of the new law, and this decrease is more extensive in neighbourhoods containing junkyards. Municipalities that implemented the new regulation presented, on average, a 6.4 per cent drop in auto thefts by year compared to non-target ones. Other crimes do not show a similar decrease, and there is no evidence of a previous downward trend in vehicles stolen.

My results shed some light on the effect of harsher supervision over a market that criminals may exploit to convert stolen vehicles into cash.

Helsinki, Finland:  United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), 2022. 27p.

By Simen Madslien

Has the increasing demand for Mexican avocados caused an escalation of violence between Mexican cartels? I theorize that the cartels enter growing licit industries to diversify their revenue stream from the drug trade. Increasing demand for legal commodities possibly leads to higher territorial competition between cartels and higher rates of violence. Recent media attention suggests that avocados are implicated in the bloody cartel business. However, earlier research found a negative relationship between cartel-related crimes and licit industries. Based on the negative relationship observed in recent studies, using an OLS and IV design, I test the hypothesis that the growth in the Mexican avocado industry leads to a decrease in cartel-related violence in Mexican municipalities. In contrast with earlier research, I find a significant increase in the total number of reported cartel-related crimes as a consequence of Mexican avocados' growing production rates. Given the growth rate of global avocado demand, leading to an explosion of Mexican avocado production in the last decade, I interpret the result as coming from intensified territorial competition between Mexican drug trafficking organizations' splintered landscape. With the necessity for cartels to diversify their revenue streams in the aftermath of the war on drugs initiated in 2006, the avocado industry's profitability is expected to draw numerous cartels to the business, increasing the likelihood of territorial contestation and rates of violence.

Bergen: Norwegian School of Economics, 2020. 77p.

By Megan Erickson and Lucas Owen

Has growing demand for licit goods caused an increase in violence among Mexican criminal organizations? We theorize that cartels enter licit markets to supplement and diversify revenues from the drug trade, and that the incentive to do so changes with revenues in licit markets. Given their comparative advantages in agricultural production and violence, we expect cartels to react to increasing demand in agricultural markets by fighting to maximize territorial control and monopolize production. Using a difference-in-differences design, we test the hypothesis that a positive shock in demand for avocados from municipalities in the states of Michoac´an and Jalisco led to an increase in cartel violence. We ultimately find the opposite of what we expect. The enactment of a U.S. phytosanitary policy in June of 2016, which extended U.S. demand for avocados to municipalities formerly unable to export to the United States, led to a significant decrease in cartel homicides compared to municipalities that were unaffected by this policy. Given that cartels were present in most areas of Michoac´an and Jalisco before the policy, we interpret this result as coming from cartels anticipating increased territorial contestation. Since cartels expect others to challenge their territory, they bolster their defenses, reducing incentives for territorial contestation.

Working Paper, Washington Political Economy Forum, 2020. 31p.

By Fernando Sobrino

The number of major Drug Trafficking Organizations (known as cartels) in Mexico increased from four to nine over the last two decades. This was accompanied by an increase in drug trade related violence. This paper examines the relationship between violence and competition for market share among cartels. To measure cartel presence, a difficult to measure phenomenon, I construct a novel data set of cartel presence across Mexican municipalities by scraping Google News and using natural language processing. To study how market size and structure interact with violence, I exploit two empirical strategies using within municipality variation. First, I interact heroin prices with agro-climatic conditions to grow opium poppy, using exogenous variation in demand for heroin from the 2010 OxyContin reformulation. This reformulation made OxyContin harder to abuse and led some opioid abusers to switch to heroin. Second, I exploit variation in the timing of cartel entry in a municipality. Cartel presence increases substantially after 2010 in municipalities well-suited to grow opium poppy. As more cartels enter a market, homicide rates increase. These results suggest that a substantial part of the increase in violence that Mexico experienced in the last fifteen years is due to criminal groups fighting for market share of heroin, not only due to changes in government enforcement.

Working Paper,  Department of Economics, Princeton University, 2020. 63p.

By Alanna Fulk 

This thesis examines research from the disciplines of political science and criminal justice to develop a theory that explains geographic variation in violence related to organized crime. Large-scale organized crime violence exhibits characteristics of both ordinary crime violence and political violence, but these subjects are generally analyzed separately. However, as large-scale organized crime has become more prevalent and violent in recent years, most notably in Latin America, studies, including this one, have attempted to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to better explain trends in organized crime onset, termination and violence. This thesis argues that although the overall goal of organized crime groups is not to take control of a country, both organized crime groups and insurgent groups confront the state’s monopoly on violence, leading to evident similarities in the way they use violence to attain their goals. They both use violence to maintain control over resources, take control from other groups and retaliate against the government. Previous literature has demonstrated that control is directly linked to geographic variation in political violence and through case studies of organized crime violence in Honduras and Brazil, as well as negative binomial regression analysis of organized crime violence in Mexico, this thesis finds that control is also directly linked to geographic variation in organized crime violence.   

Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida, 2019. 111p.

By The Washington Office on Latin America, Latin America Working Group Education Fund, Due Process of Law Foundation, and Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

Guatemala’s justice system has been co-opted by a network of corrupt political, economic, and military elites seeking to advance their own interests and to ensure that their acts of corruption and grave human rights violations from the armed conflict remain in impunity, while silencing voices from civil society organizations and independent media. Honest judges and prosecutors have been criminalized, threatened, removed, or transferred from their posts by the very institutions supposed to be advancing the rule of law and justice. Twenty-five judges and prosecutors, including the nation’s lead anti-corruption prosecutor, have fled the country into exile. The impacts of the co-optation of Guatemala’s justice system will set the country back decades. 

This report, produced by Washington Office on Latin America, Latin America Working Group Education Fund, Due Process of Law Foundation, and Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, provides analysis on the steps taken to undermine Guatemala’s justice system from the stacking of its highest courts with corrupt judges to the co-opting and dismantling of the Attorney General’s Office and specialized prosecutors’ offices. It explains the longer-term implications of the ousting of honest judges and prosecutors and a broken justice system for the rule of law, transitional justice and protecting freedom of expression and the rights of marginalized communities in Guatemala.

Washington, DC: The Authors, 2022. 10p.

By The Washington Office on Latin America, Latin America Working Group Education Fund, and Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

In Guatemala, human rights defenders, independent judges and prosecutors, journalists, and Indigenous leaders are under assault as part of a broader attack on democracy and path towards a kleptocracy. The criminalization and closing of civic space is one of the strategies being used by corrupt networks, the Attorney General’s Office, private actors, members of the military, and political elites to quell disruptions to their power, avoid historic responsibility for crimes committed during the internal armed conflict, and silence voices exposing corruption. It has resulted in severe democratic backsliding, creating a dangerous terrain in which human rights defenders, journalists, Indigenous community leaders, and justice operators receive no State protection and are instead persecuted and criminalized by their own government in complicity with private actors, often to the point of having to flee the country for their lives. The current situation in Guatemala creates serious challenges for U.S. policy and assistance and means that civil society organizations, human rights defenders, Indigenous communities, and journalists are more in need of international protection than ever.

Washington, DC: The Authors, 2022. 8p.

By The Washington Office on Latin America, Latin America Working Group, and Guatemala Human Rights

  With the support of the international community, Guatemala was making progress in strengthening the rule of law. Today, rule of law in Guatemala is on a dramatic downward spiral. A handful of corrupt political, military, and economic elites seeking to maintain their privileges at the expense of Guatemala’s Indigenous majority population have captured the state. They have systematically dismantled anti-corruption mechanisms such as UN-led CICIG and the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office and infiltrated the justice system, starting at the top. Independent media, human rights defenders, and Indigenous leaders have been targeted and civic space restricted. Corruption is pervasive, depriving the population of access to basic public services, and few independent actors remain able to confront it. U.S. policy is also undermined. The United States needs to consider a range of policy tools to counter such a broad challenge to basic democratic values in Guatemala.   

Washington, DC: The Authors, 2022. 7p.

By Carolina Velez Ospina

The provision effects of local public goods on crime and education are not clear in the literature. While some argue that provision does not affect these outcomes, other find that effects depend on the benefits it offers to the community. This paper studies the effect of the construction of cultural centers in Medellín, Colombia on crime and test scores in mathematics and language. This policy is interesting since the communities participated in the design of these cultural centers. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences strategy, I find that schools near centers improve their test performance, especially for younger children. Regarding crime, I find that in neighborhoods near centers, there is a reduction in motorcycle and car theft crimes.

  Universidad del Rosario, Facultad de Economía, 2020. 51p.   

By Christopher Blattman, Donald Green, Daniel Ortega, Santiago Tobón

In 2016 the city of Bogotá doubled police patrols and intensified city services on high-crime streets. They did so based on a policy and criminological consensus that such place-based programs not only decrease crime, but also have positive spillovers to nearby streets. To test this, we worked with Bogotá to experiment on an unprecedented scale. They randomly assigned 1,919 streets to either 8 months of doubled police patrols, greater municipal services, both, or neither. Such scale brings econometric challenges. Spatial spillovers in dense networks introduce bias and complicate variance estimation through “fuzzy clustering.” But a design-based approach and randomization inference produce valid hypothesis tests in such settings. In contrast to the consensus, we find intensifying state presence in Bogotá had modest but imprecise direct effects and that such crime displaced nearby, especially property crimes. Confidence intervals suggest we can rule out total reductions in crime of more than 2–3% from the two policies. More promising, however, is suggestive evidence that more state presence led to an 5% fall in homicides and rape citywide. One interpretation is that state presence may more easily deter crimes of passion than calculation, and place-based interventions could be targeted against these incredibly costly and violent crimes.

Chicago: Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago, 2019. 80p.

By Richard Wortley And Stephen Smallbone

From the foreword by Graeme Newman: “…We see from the authors' outstanding review of who the offenders and victims are and how they are connected through the Internet and other technologies that Internet child pornography is the quintessential global crime, bringing with it the increasingly familiar problems of policing-crimes defined differently across multiple countries and jurisdictions, the labyrinthine and decentralized nature of the Internet, the capability to transmit images across borders around the world instantaneously, and the availability of smartphones and other mobile devices to children and those who would exploit them. They remind us that at the shocking end of the continuum of child pornography, it is essentially local because the actual, original production of child pornographic images most often results from contact sexual abuse by adults with close familial or social relationships to the children. It is the international distribution and con- sumption of images that convert the local crimes into global ones…”

NY. Praeger. 2012. 165p.

Edited by Mangai Natarajan

International crime and justice is an emerging field that covers crime and justice from a global perspective. 'This book introduces the nature of internationaland transnational crimes; theoretical foundations to understanding the relationship between social change and the waxing and waning of the crime opportunity structure; globalization; migration; culture conflicts and the emerging legal frameworks for their prevention and control. tI presents the challenges involved in delivering justice and international cooperative efforts to deter, detect, and respond to international and transnational crimes, and the need for international research and data resources to go beyond anecdote and impres- sionistic accounts to testing and developing theories to build the discipline that bring tangible improvements to the peace, security, and well-being of the globalizing world. 'This books is a timely analysis of the complex subject ofinternational crime and justice for students, scholars, policy makers, and advocates who strive for the pursuit of justice for millions of victims.

Cambridge England and NY.. Cambridge University Press. 2019. 560p.