By The International Crisis Group   

What’s new? Violent gangs have taken the opportunity presented by Haiti’s prolonged political crisis to seize control of much of the country, bringing its economy to a halt. With cholera resurgent, Haiti’s government has called on the UN and foreign partners to deploy a public security force to push the gangs back. Why does it matter? Decades of foreign interventions in Haiti have instilled reluctance in the country and abroad to contemplate a public security mission. Operational risks and the country’s political divide have also cooled foreigners on a possible deployment, but interviews suggest that popular support for it, especially in gang-controlled areas, is rising. What should be done? The collapsing Haitian state and the severity of the humanitarian emergency justify preparations for a mission. But its deployment should hinge on adequate planning to operate in urban areas and support from Haiti’s main political forces, including their firm commitment to work together in creating a legitimate transitional government.   

Port-au-Prince/New York/Washington/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2022. 20p.

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 Amanda R. Witwer, Lynn Langton, Michael J. D. Vermeer, Duren Banks, Dulani Woods, Brian A. Jackson

The proliferation of websites, social media platforms, and applications that enable users to interact virtually and often anonymously has given rise to new modes and methods of perpetrating harassment, abuse, and other criminal behaviors that compromise victims' privacy and safety. These types of acts, termed technology-facilitated abuse (TFA), can involve the use or distribution of the victim's personal information, which compromises the victim's privacy and poses a threat to their safety. Efforts to combat these profoundly harmful acts are limited by a lack of awareness among the general public and criminal justice practitioners, impediments to investigation and adjudication presented by digital spaces, and laws and policies that have not kept pace with advancements in digital technologies. To examine this issue, RTI International and the RAND Corporation convened an expert workshop. The participants discussed the challenges, opportunities, and complexities faced by law enforcement and criminal justice practitioners in TFA cases. Using these discussions, the panel members identified and ranked needs for the public, law enforcement, and criminal justice practitioners to successfully identify and prosecute TFA cases. This report provides the prioritized list of needs and accompanying context from the discussion that resulted from this effort.

Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2020.   25p.

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 Andres I Vecino-Ortiza & Deivis N Guzman-Tordecilla  

Objective: To assess the effect of a permanent gun-carrying restriction on gun-related mortality in Colombia between 2008 and 2014, and determine differences in the effect of the restriction by place of death and sex. Methods: In 2012, Bogotá and Medellín introduced a permanent gun-carrying restriction. We compared gun-related mortality rates in these cities (intervention cities) with the rates in all other Colombian cities with more than 500 000 inhabitants (control cities). We used data from the Colombian National Department of Statistics to calculate monthly gun-related mortality rates between 2008 and 2014 for intervention and control cities. We used a differences-in-differences method with fixed effects to assess differences in gun-related mortality in intervention and control cities before and after the introduction of the gun-carrying restriction. We stratified effects by place of death (public area or residence) and sex. We made robustness checks to test the assumptions of the models. Findings: Gun-related deaths in the control and intervention cities decreased between 2008 and 2014; however, the decrease was greater in the intervention cities (from 20.29 to 14.93 per 100 000 population; 26.4%) than in the control cities (from 37.88 to 34.56 per 100 000 population; 8.8%). The restriction led to a 22.3% reduction in the monthly gun-related mortality rate in Bogotá and Medellín. The reduction was greater in public areas and for males. Robustness checks supported the assumptions of the models. Conclusion_ The permanent restriction on carrying guns reduced gun-related deaths. This policy could be used to reduce gun-related injuries in urban centres of other countries with large numbers of gun-related deaths.

Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 98 (‎3)‎: 170 - 176

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.

 Kalliroi S. Ziavroua , Stephen Noguerab , Vassiliki A. Boumba

Counterfeit, fake, adulterated or falsified drugs and pharmaceuticals, could be branded or generic drugs, excipients and active substances (in drugs and vaccines), medical supplies and devices, etc, intended to pass as the original. Counterfeits are always inferior in terms of quality, safety and efficacy compared to the original pharmaceuticals, and subsequently, they pose an unpredictable risk to public health and lead to loss of confidence in medicines, healthcare providers, and health systems. In the decades before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a constant trend of increased trafficking was reported. However, the pandemic created a combination of public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic that made problematic the access and supply of high quality essential medicines and health products, and pushed consumers and vendors even more towards counterfeit pharmaceuticals. This contribution aims to review the trends in counterfeit drugs and pharmaceuticals trafficking, the health impact of their use, as well as, measures and actions implemented to restrict their proliferation, before and during COVID-19 pandemic; the relative recommendations, the expressed perspectives and the existing limitations are thoroughly discussed.   

  Forensic Science International 338 (2022) 111382

By The United Nations of Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

  Restrictions on movement imposed by govern- ments across the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic have had an impact on the trafficking of substandard and falsified medical products. Interpol and the World Customs Organization (WCO) reported that seizures of substandard and falsified medical products, including person- al protective equipment (PPE), increased for the first time in March 2020. The emergence of trafficking in PPE signals a significant shift in organized criminal group behaviour that is directly attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought huge demand for medical products such as PPE over a relatively short period of time. It is foreseeable that, with the evolution of COVID-19 and developments in medicinal treatments and/or the repurposing of existing medicines, criminal behaviour will shift from trafficking in PPE to the development and delivery of a COVID-19 vaccine. Furthermore, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure involved in addressing the pandemic are likely to continue in the form of online scams aimed at health procurement authorities. Challenges in pandemic preparedness, ranging from weak regulatory and legal frameworks to the prevention of the manufacturing and trafficking of substandard and falsified products and cyber security shortcomings, were evident before COVID-19, but the pandemic has exacerbated them and it will be difficult to make significant improvements in the immediate short term. The report concludes that crime targeting COVID-19 medical products will become more focused with significantly greater risks to pub- lic health as the containment phase of the pan- demic passes to the treatment and prevention stages.  

Vienna: UNODC, 2020. 31p.

By Ben Brewster, Robinson, G., Brotherton, V., Silverman, B., & Walsh, D

The second briefing from ongoing research indicates that restrictions introduced in response to Covid-19 have forced adaptations in the methods used by County Lines drug supply networks and have impacted upon the ways law enforcement work to detect and dismantle County Lines activity, as well as safeguard those vulnerable to criminal exploitation.

Nottingham, UK: University of Nottingham, 2021. 3p. 

By The United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG CAAC)

  Each year thousands of children are deprived of their liberty in situations of armed conflict, many because of their actual or alleged association with parties to the conflict or on alleged national security-related grounds. The increasing numbers of children being detained is a concern in itself, but also because child detainees are highly vulnerable to a wide range of human rights violations and abuses, including conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). The vast majority (over 95%) of children detained in armed conflict are boys. So, although all children are at risk of sexual violence in detention settings, and girls are disproportionality impacted by CRSV generally, this discussion paper focuses on how detained boys are exposed to the risk of CRSV in particularly high numbers and examines possible responses to this. Based on available data, rape and other forms of sexual violence against males, including boys, are reported more frequently in situations of deprivation of liberty than in most other settings. Although many, possibly most, incidents are never reported, CRSV against boys deprived of their liberty has been documented in recent years in countries including Afghanistan, Central African Republic (CAR), Iraq, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Most documented incidents relate to boys held by state security forces but CRSV against boys deprived of their liberty by non-State armed groups (NSAGs) has also been reported. In both instances, CRSV has been used as a form of torture, to punish, to extract information or to exert authority. In some contexts, it is also committed by other detainees. Chronic under-reporting of CRSV in general, combined with challenges involved in gathering data in detention settings, means that the true scale of the problem is not known and the risks to, vulnerabilities of, and impacts on young detainees are poorly understood. This, by extension, hampers efforts to effectively prevent and respond to it. However, CRSV in detention settings is not a standalone issue, but must be addressed as part of broader, ongoing efforts to protect children in situations of armed conflict. It is also necessarily a collective endeavour, requiring dedicated attention from a wide range of different stakeholders.   

New York: United Nations, 2022. 44p.

By The United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG CAAC)

  In the Central African Republic (CAR), thousands of children have been recruited and used by parties to armed conflict over the last decade, predominantly by non-State armed groups (NSAGs). According to UN reports, many girls have been recruited for a wide range of purposes, including sexual exploitation or otherwise subjected to sexual abuse during their association with the groups, with devastating consequences for the girls. As is the case elsewhere, far less is known about how sexual violence impacts boys associated with fighting forces, such as happens in CAR, and about the needs for care and support that may arise from it. Recognising that conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) disproportionately affects women, including girls, and that all CRSV is severely underreported for all age and gender groups, this discussion note is intended to shed light on the under-discussed issue of how CRSV affects boys, as demonstrated in one of the situations of children and armed conflict (CAAC), specifically in CAR. Its aim is to contribute to building a better understanding of the potential risks to, and vulnerabilities of, boys to CRSV when associated with armed forces or armed groups in CAR, and to explore how existing medical care and mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS), as well as legal/judicial and reintegration responses, can better take account of the possibility of such abuse. The following analysis and recommendations are not claimed to be exclusively relevant to boys in CAR, but instead to provide greater visibility to a phenomenon that exists in many conflict settings. Based on information gathered between March and July 2022 through interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) with actors involved in efforts to secure the release and reintegration of children associated with armed forces or armed groups (CAAFAG) and respond to CRSV and other forms of gender-based violence (GBV) in CAR, a range of gaps in knowledge and other challenges were identified.  

New York: United Nations, 2022. 52p.

By Sheridan Miyamoto ; Cynthia Bittner; Daniel F. Perkins; Lorah Dorn; Cameron Richardson; Hui Zhao; Dennis Scanlon

This is the final report following 4 years of developing and operating the SAFE-T Center, which was launched in 2017 with support from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) as a means of improving access to high quality sexual assault (SA) care by providing expert, live, interactive mentoring, quality assurance, and evidence-based training to less experienced nurses via telehealth technology.

 When a SA examination is performed at one of the partner hospitals, one of SAFE-T Center’s expert Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs) (teleSANEs) provides real-time support to both the on-site nurse and the patient, ensuring best practices, proper evidence collection, and a supportive environment for the patient. For the current project, detailed progress reports were completed on a biannual basis throughout the funding period (2017-2021). Given the level of detail in prior progress reports, the current report focuses instead on a high-level overview of project goals, the philosophy and approach to the work in advancing goals, and key outcomes. A critical part of this effort was to determine whether the solutions envisioned and created had the positive impact intended. Much of the report addresses reflections on program effects and lessons learned. Overall, it was evident that comprehensive hubs of expertise can increase equitable access to quality SA care in a field with chronic shortages of expertise. Community partners in eight diverse and unique communities value the resources provided. Policy and legislative initiatives are needed to establish minimum standards of SA care and to provide incentives and support to ensure hospitals that are not able to offer expert comprehensive SANE-led care can provide expertise through telehealth programs.

State College, PA: Pennsylvania Sexual Assault Forensic Examination and Training (SAFE-T) Center, 2022. 64p.