By Thom Snaphaan & Teun van Ruitenburg 

This article presents a further development of the existing crime scripting framework to enhance insight in the financial aspects of profit-driven crime: financial crime scripting. By drawing on the foundations of crime script analysis, financial crime scripting allows to generate, organise and systematise knowledge about the financial aspects of the crime commission processes of a variety of crime types, and accounts for linking the dots with financial crimes, such as bribery, bankruptcy fraud and money laundering. Viewing these financial crimes as supporting or succeeding offences in light of profit-driven crimes, and at the same time providing guidance to analyse these offences as profit-driven crimes in itself, opens the door for detailed analyses without losing sight of the bigger picture, i.e., the interconnectedness with other crimes. This analytical method helps crime researchers to take into account the financial aspects of crime-commission processes in crime script analyses and could help law enforcement agencies and other crime prevention partners to go beyond a proceeds-of-crime approach and put a follow-the-money approach in practice. Financial crime scripting takes full account of the financial aspects of profit-driven crime and puts relevant concepts in broader perspective, enhancing understanding with conceptual clarity. In addition to outlining the framework, the relevance for policy and practice is unravelled and avenues for future research are discussed.

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research January 2024   Download

By Victor D van Santvoord and Teun van Ruitenburg

The Netherlands operates as a distribution hub for cocaine, due to its transit characteristics cocaine is imported from South America and distributed to the rest of Europe. To enhance the financial approach to organized crimes, this article proposes a new crime script: a financial crime script. With a special focus on the importing stage, 76 Dutch court rulings are analyzed to make a first financial crime script. This financial crime script provides new insight into the proceeds, costs, and means of payment of criminal organizations and therefore could aid law enforcement in calculating criminal gains.
The Police JournalVolume 96, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 374-389

Editors: Christiane Kruse, Birgit Meyer, and Anne-Marie Korte

What makes an image offensive? — This question is addressed in this volume. It explores tensions and debates about offensive images and performative practices in various settings in and beyond Europe. Its basic premise is that a deeper understanding of what is at stake in these tensions and debates calls for a multidisciplinary conversation. The authors focus on images that appear to trigger strongly negative reactions; images that are perceived as insulting or offensive; those subject to taboos and restrictions; or those that are condemned as blasphemous. In light of recurrent acts of violence leveled against images and symbols in the contemporary, globally entangled world, addressing instances of “icono-clash” (Bruno Latour) from a new post-secular, global perspective has become a matter of urgency.

Leiden: Brill - Schöningh and Fink Social Sciences, 2018. 383p.

By Lawrence Sherman and Cambridge University associates

Crime statistics require a radical transformation if they are to provide transparent information for the general public, as well as police operational decision-making. This statement provides a blueprint for such a transformation.

Summary

The best way to count crime is to assign a weight to the harm caused by each crime, rather than by counting all crimes as if they were created equal. This can be done by summing up the days of imprisonment recommended by sentencing guidelines for each crime type, multiplied by the number of crimes of each type that were reported by victims or witnesses, then summing the weight across all crime types to equal total crime harm. Total harm can also be calibrated by any other democratically legitimate method of assigning harm levels for each crime category in relation to all others. Any method using sentencing guidelines based on the harm caused by an offence to victims, without regard to the offender’s prior record or other circumstances, meets the standard of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman et al. 2016).Footnote1 Other methods of weighing harm for each crime can apply the same principles outlined in this statement.

By using a single sum of weighted crime harm across all crime types, for each year in each community, governments can offer the public a more reliable indicator of their safety. The Crime Harm Index (CHI) would also provide a clearer indicator by leaving out crimes not reported by the public at large, such as police-initiated investigations of human trafficking and narcotics crimes, as well as crimes such as big-store shop-theft that are detected by a company’s security staff. The clarity comes by separate reporting of proactive investigations that measure of varying levels of investment in detections rather than actual crime levels. A CHI also leaves out crimes reported in the current year but which occurred in a prior year—because the existing system of counting crimes when they are reported but years after they occurred distorts the measurement of current public safety for which police are held accountable.

The single CHI sum also lends clarity to other relevant indicators, such as the “detection” rate, which currently treats all crimes as created equal. It allows police to invest scarce resources in proportion to the harm of each offence type, by showing the public the proportion of all harm for which police bring offenders to justice. A Harm Detection Fraction (HDF) would use CHI to give the fact that over two-thirds (67%) of murders are detected far more weight than the low detection rate for vandalism (Office of National Statistics 2019). Similarly, a Proactive Policing Index (PPI) would use the CHI to give credit—instead of blame—to police for detecting hidden slavery and organized crime. The annual national and local crime reports recommended by this Consensus Statement are comprised of these seven statistical series to be calculated consistently from each year to the next: 

• A Crime Harm Index (CHI) for crimes against victims in the current year.

• Crime counts by all crime categories, used to calculate the CHI.

• A Historic Offences Index (HOCHI), a CHI for crime occurring in prior years.

• A Proactive Policing Index (PPI), weighted by crime type as for the CHI.

• A Company-Detected Crime Harm Index (CDCHI), also weighted by CHI.

• A Harm Detection Fraction (HDF), which is the proportion of CHI with police detections.

• Detection rates per 100 by all crime categories, used to calculate the HDF.

This system would give the public a reliable and realistic assessment of trends, patterns and differences in public safety. It would also give police a proportionate system of incentives to manage demands for their services with a clear focus on cutting the harm from crime, and not just the high volume of low-harm crimes counted equally. It offers a “bottom-line” for crime, like the profits of a business: a clear metric that untangles the current confusion about what the profusion of crime statistics really means for the general public.

Camb J Evid Based Polic 4, 1–14 (2020).

By Teun van Ruitenburg & Stijn Ruiter

An emerging line of research explores how calculating the harm associated with different types of crime serves as a method to measure crime across times, places and people. A crime harm index (CHI) is suggested to produce a more reliable bottom line indicator of public safety and it would allow law enforcement agencies to invest their scarce resources in proportion to the harm caused by various types of crimes. This scoping literature review maps the literature on crime harm indices published after 2006 by answering the following research questions: (1) what is the rationale for a CHI, (2) what are the possible ways to operationalize a CHI; (3) how can a CHI be used in crime analysis; (4) what are the general outcomes of the studies using a CHI; (5) what are the known challenges and critiques of a CHI and (6) what research gaps related to CHI are expressed in this field of research?

Police Practice and Research 

An International Journal

Volume 24, 2023 - Issue 4

By Mary McCoy

After a nation has transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, how are democratic norms most effectively fostered and maintained? This book uses as its case study Indonesia after the fall of the dictator Suharto to reveal that a contentious, even scandal-obsessed press can actually prove extremely useful for an emergent democracy. A society that can tolerate and protect journalists willing to expose corruption and scandal among elites is one, the author finds, in which ordinary citizens are willing to believe in and support other democratic institutions. Based on extensive interviews and research in Indonesia, this book offers a new and surprising perspective on the role of the press and the nature of scandal-driven journalism in fledgling democracies.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 223p.

By Aaron J. Rosenthal

The State You See uncovers a racial gap in the way the American government appears in people's lives. It makes it clear that public policy changes over the last fifty years have driven all Americans to distrust the government that they see in their lives, even though Americans of different races are not seeing the same kind of government.

For white people, these policy changes have involved a rising number of generous benefits submerged within America's tax code, which taken together cost the government more than Social Security and Medicare combined. Political attention focused on this has helped make welfare and taxes more visible representations of government for white Americans. As a result, white people are left with the misperception that government does nothing for them, apart from take their tax money to spend on welfare. Distrust of government is the result. For people of color, distrust is also rampant but for different reasons. Over the last fifty years, America has witnessed increasingly overbearing policing and swelling incarceration numbers. These changes have disproportionately impacted communities of color, helping to make the criminal legal system a unique visible manifestation of government in these communities.

While distrust of government emerges in both cases, these different roots lead to different consequences. White people are mobilized into politics by their distrust, feeling that they must speak up in order to reclaim their misspent tax dollars. In contrast, people of color are pushed away from government due to a belief that engaging in American elections will yield the same kind of unresponsiveness and violence that comes from interactions with the police. The result is a perpetuation of the same kind of racial inequality that has always been present in American democracy. The State You See is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the American government engages in subtle forms of discrimination and how it continues to uphold racial inequality in the present day.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

By Radmila Mladenova

The study ventures into a topic that has been so far largely neglected in film studies: the ‘gypsy’ phantasm on the big screen. It reconstructs the history of ‘gypsy’ representations in film since the birth of the medium providing a systematic film-theoretical analysis of their aesthetic and social functions. Based on a corpus of over 150 works from European and US cinema, it is shown that ‘gypsy’-themed feature films share the pattern of an ‘ethno-racial’ masquerade, irrespective of the place and time of their origin. The author thus expands the research, concentrated until now in the field of literature, with another art form, film, opening up new dimensions of (popular) cultural antigypsyism.

Heidelberg: University Publishing (heiUP), 2022. 448p.

Edited by Jody Enders

Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 284p.

By Ulrich F. Opfermann

The book is the first to provide a systematic overview of a previously neglected area of the judicial investigation of the Nazi system: the handling of the crimes against the Sinti and Roma in West German NSG proceedings, taking into account the crime scene in Eastern Europe. The meticulously researched study presents numerous procedures. It provides information about the legal requirements of the West German special judicial system, traces the course of the proceedings and asks about the roles of the accused and witnesses as well as the judicial staff. The focus is on the collective proceedings on the “Gypsy complex” (1958–1970), planned as a major trial alongside the first Auschwitz trial, which, contrary to its claim, had little response and is now largely forgotten.

Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2023. 575p.

Edited by Radmila Mladenova, Tobias von Borcke, Pavel Brunssen, Markus End, Anja Reuss 

Antiziganism is a common phenomenon on the big screen. To examine this issue from various perspectives, acclaimed scholars and junior researchers, filmmakers and human rights activists, both Roma and non-Roma, gathered in Berlin in 2018 and presented their research output, shared personal testimonies and discussed films at the international conference “Antigypsyism and Film”. The present bilingual volume is a documentation of the conference proceedings. It contains academic articles and essays as well as interviews with filmmakers grouped in four thematic sections: antigypsyism in film, the question of ethics, strategies of subversion and antigypsyism in comparison to other forms of racism.; Antigypsyism is normal on the big screen. In order to examine this problem from different perspectives, scientists and young researchers, filmmakers and human rights activists - Roma and non-Roma alike - gathered in Berlin in 2018 for an international conference: “Antigypsyism and Film”. They presented their research results, shared personal testimonies and discussed films. This bilingual volume documents this conference, which is unique in its form. The conference proceedings include academic articles and essays as well as interviews with filmmakers, divided into four thematic sections: antigypsyism in film, questions of ethics, strategies of subversion and antigypsyism in relation to other resentments.

Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP), 2020. 304p.

By Sarah J. Link

This open access book examines how the form of the list features as a tool for meaning-making in the genre of detective fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book analyzes how both readers and detectives rely on listing as an ordering and structuring tool, and highlights the crucial role that lists assume in the reading process. It extends the boundaries of an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists in literature and caters to a newly revived interest in form and New Formalist approaches in narratological research. The central aim of this book is to show how detective fiction makes use of lists in order to frame various conceptions of knowledge. The frames created by these lists are crucial to decoding the texts, and they can be used to demonstrate how readers can be engaged in the act of detection or manipulated into accepting certain propositions in the text.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 215p.

By Alexander Sedlmaier

Combining the tools of political, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany explores strategies of legitimization developed by advocates of militant resistance to certain manifestations of consumer capitalism. The book contributes to a more sober evaluation of West German protest movements, not just terrorism, as it refrains from emotional and moral judgments, but takes the protesters’ approaches seriously, which, regarding consumer society, had a rational core. Political violence is not presented as the result of individual shortcomings, but emerges in relation to major societal changes, i.e., the unprecedented growth of consumption. This new perspective sheds important light on violence and radical protest in post-war Germany, as previous books have failed to examine to what extent these forms of resistance should be regarded as reactions to changing regimes of provision. Continuing the recently growing interest in the interdependence of countercultures and consumer society, the focus on violence gives the argument a unique twist, making the book thought-provoking and engaging.

 Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 344p

Edited by Witold Klaus, Irena Rzeplin′ska Dagmara Woz′niakowska-Fajst

Criminal Careers follows the lives and criminal behaviours of 2,397 people in Poland who as juveniles committed a crime and received a form of punishment from the juvenile court between the late 1980s and the year 2000. Through combining quantitative and qualitative research, their criminal careers, the differences between men and women, risk factors, and reasons for non-desistance are analysed. Uniquely, the authors have used an extensive database of former juveniles, in which as many as 40% were women. This book therefore makes a comparison between women and men in terms of their future life paths. Additionally, the researched group consisted of teenagers from two different periods: the 1980s (the transition generation) and 2000 (the millennial generation), which in the context of Central and Eastern European countries means that they entered adulthood in completely different realities. These differences are therefore also explored in depth within the book. By focusing on Poland, the book provides a different perspective to criminal career research, which is generally limited to a few countries in Western Europe and the United States. The book will be of great interest to academics and students who are developing their own research in the fields of criminal careers, juvenile delinquency, and antisocial behaviours by young people. It will also appeal to professionals, including juvenile judges, probation officers, staff in correctional facilities and social rehabilitation institutions, social workers and employees of nonprofit organisations that support juveniles, people in crisis, and prisoners or ex-prisoners.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 303p.

By Dik van Arkel

Antisemitism is an exceptional historical phenomenon. Its history goes back at least 2000 years and has manifested itself in many countries and in a wide range of societies. However, it is not a universal phenomenon. Many countries have no tradition of anti-Semitism and even in those where anti-Semitism periodically raises its head, there have been long periods where it appears to have lain dormant. But it has never altogether disappeared, and all the large-scale social changes of the past two millennia have given it extra impetus. This definitive study tackles the complex roots and manifestations of anti-Semitism over the centuries, tracing the rise of anti-Jewish stereotypes and the circumstances in which racial prejudice may have tragic consequences. This book will quickly become a classic text for students and researchers in this persistent and worldwide prejudice.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 593p.

By Jill Suzanne Smith

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2013. 237p

By Alice Mauger

This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay explanations of mental illness and its causes, and patient experiences, were influenced by these concepts. The strong emphasis on land and its interconnectedness with notions of class identity and respectability in Ireland lends a particularly interesting dimension. The book interrogates the popular notion that relatives were routinely locked away to be deprived of land or inheritance, querying how often “land grabbing” Irish families really abused the asylum system for their personal economic gain. The book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland and the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland.

Cham, SWIT: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 290p.

By Rosemary A. Kelanic

Black Gold and Blackmail seeks to explain why great powers adopt such different strategies to protect their oil access from politically motivated disruptions. In extreme cases, such as Imperial Japan in 1941, great powers fought wars to grab oil territory in anticipation of a potential embargo by the Allies; in other instances, such as Germany in the early Nazi period, states chose relatively subdued measures like oil alliances or domestic policies to conserve oil. What accounts for this variation? Fundamentally, it is puzzling that great powers fear oil coercion at all because the global market makes oil sanctions very difficult to enforce. Rosemary A. Kelanic argues that two variables determine what strategy a great power will adopt: the petroleum deficit, which measures how much oil the state produces domestically compared to what it needs for its strategic objectives; and disruptibility, which estimates the susceptibility of a state's oil imports to military interdiction—that is, blockade. Because global markets undercut the effectiveness of oil sanctions, blockade is in practice the only true threat to great power oil access. That, combined with the devastating consequences of oil deprivation to a state's military power, explains why states fear oil coercion deeply despite the adaptive functions of the market. Together, these two variables predict a state's coercive vulnerability, which determines how willing the state will be to accept the costs and risks attendant on various potential strategies. Only those great powers with large deficits and highly disruptible imports will adopt the most extreme strategy: direct control of oil through territorial conquest.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 230 p

by Robert Fine, Philip Spencer

Universalism shows two faces to the world: an emancipatory face that looks to the inclusion of the other, and a repressive face that sees in the other a failure to pass some fundamental test of humanity. Universalism can be used to demand that we treat all persons as human beings regardless of their differences, but it can also be used to represent whole categories of people as inhuman, not yet human or even enemies of humanity.

The Jewish experience offers an equivocal test case. Universalism has stimulated the struggle for Jewish emancipation, but it has also helped to develop the idea that there is something peculiarly harmful to humanity about Jews – that there is a 'Jewish question' that needs to be 'solved'. This original and stimulating book traces struggles within the Enlightenment, Marxism, critical theory and the contemporary left, seeking to rescue universalism from its repressive, antisemitic undertones.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018. 144p

Edited by Branko Lobnikar , Catharina Vogt , Joachim Kersten

The monograph on improving the response of first responders to domestic violence in Europe aims to identify gaps in the cooperation of first-line responders and deliver recommendations, toolkits and collaborative training for European police organizations and medical and social work professionals. The goal is to improve integrate institutional response to domestic violence. Shared training and adequate risk assessment tools will create a positive feedback loop, increasing reporting rates of domestic violence to police, the medical profession, and community and social work practitioners.

Malibor: University of Maribor, University Press, 2021. 363 p