By Europol

This report is the first of its kind to analyse in depth the characteristics that make criminal actors particularly threatening. Enhancing law enforcement’s understanding of their functioning and core capabilities will further strengthen the fight against serious and organised crime. It is essential as a complement to a commodity-based approach. Context: enhancing our understanding of criminal networks 1 Europol, 2021, European Union Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment, A corrupting influence: the infiltration and undermining of Europe’s economy and society by organised crime, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, accessible at https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/ sites/default/files/documents/socta2021_1.pdf 2 Belgian presidency, Council of the European Union, Priorities, accessed on 8 February 2024, accessible at https://belgian-presidency.consilium.europa.eu/ en/programme/priorities/ 3 European Commission, Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the EU roadmap to fight drug trafficking and organised crime, COM/2023/641 final, 18 October 2023, accessible at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52023DC0641 Serious and organised crime is omnipresent and continues to represent a major threat to the internal security of the European Union (EU). In order to fight it effectively, law enforcement needs to understand the key areas where it should prioritise resources. The threat posed by organised crime is often assessed through the dimension of criminal markets and criminal activities. However, the picture is incomplete without analysing the capabilities and intent of its key players. One key approach is to focus on and address the most threatening criminal networks that affect the internal security of the EU. Understanding their critical strengths is paramount as these are the criminal networks that exert significant negative impact on the societies and economies of EU Member States. The EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (SOCTA) 2021 brought the changing relationships between criminal actors into focus in an organised crime landscape that is characterised by a networked environment where cooperation between criminals is fluid, systematic and profit-driven.1 The concept ‘criminal network’ reflects the nature of the current criminal landscape, which is complex and includes a variety of criminal associations. Criminal networks involve collaboration between groups and individuals – groups of different organisational character, and individuals who are either embedded within a particular network or operate outside of it. This analysis brings to light the characteristics of those criminal networks that pose the highest threat to the EU’s internal security. The aim is to strenghten our understanding of criminal networks, in order to help policy makers and law enforcement make informed policy and operational decisions to tackle them. This report responds to several initiatives that highlight the need to enhance our understanding of what shapes the threat of criminal networks, including by the EU Justice and Home Affairs Ministers and the current Belgian Presidency of the EU Council.2 The results of the analysis will complement the commodity-based assessment of the EU SOCTA 2025 with a deeper criminal-actor focused analysis. It will also support the EMPACT Operational Action Plan on High-Risk Criminal Networks on developing a methodology to identify the most threatening criminal networks. It forms part of the EU roadmap to fight drug trafficking and organised crime under Action 4.  

Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.2024. 60p.

By Roderic Broadhurst, Matthew Ball, Chuxuan Jiang, Joy Wang and Harshit Trivedi

Opioids, including the highly potent synthetic opioids fentanyl and carfentanil, are commonly sold on illicit cryptomarkets or Tor darknet markets. Data collected throughout 2019 from 12 large darknet markets that sold opioids enabled observation of the impact of law enforcement seizures and voluntary or scam market closures on the availability of fentanyl and other opioids.

Trends in opioid and fentanyl availability before and after law enforcement interventions indicate whether market operators and sellers are deterred and whether market closures lead to displacement, dispersal or substitution. Evidence of all of these outcomes was present in both descriptive and trend analyses, although most effects were short lived. Market closures, especially law enforcement seizures, reduced the availability of opioids, in particular fentanyl, as well as increasing prices and displacing vendors to other markets. Market closures also led vendors to substitute fentanyl for other opioids or other illicit drugs.

Research Report no. 18. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2021. 73p.

By William Garriott

In its steady march across the United States, methamphetamine has become, to quote former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “the most dangerous drug in America.” As a result, there has been a concerted effort at the local level to root out the methamphetamine problem by identifying the people at its source—those known or suspected to be involved with methamphetamine. Government-sponsored anti-methamphetamine legislation has enhanced these local efforts, formally and informally encouraging rural residents to identify meth offenders in their communities.
Policing Methamphetamine shows what happens in everyday life—and to everyday life—when methamphetamine becomes an object of collective concern. Drawing on interviews with users, police officers, judges, and parents and friends of addicts in one West Virginia town, William Garriott finds that this overriding effort to confront the problem changed the character of the community as well as the role of law in creating and maintaining social order. Ultimately, this work addresses the impact of methamphetamine and, more generally, the war on drugs, on everyday life in the United States.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2011. 201p.

By W. Bradford Wilcox | Rafael A. Mangual | Seth Cannon | Joseph E. Price

The debate about how best to respond to urban crime—a debate that has become more important in light of recent increases in violent crime and homicide in many cities across America—has tended to focus on two perspectives. The first prioritizes tackling the “social structural factors” (unemployment, economic inequality, poverty, etc.) that are thought to be the “root causes” of crime, and violent crime, in particular. A second perspective rejects this structural approach in favor of a strategy that relies on traditional law-enforcement institutions (namely, police, prosecutors, and jails/prisons), often citing the sharp violent crime declines of the 1990s and 2000s that occurred in the wake of new policing and prosecutorial approaches—even in the face of structural realities said to be at the root of the urban crime problem.

But a third perspective seeks to understand how the fragile state of core social institutions—schools, churches, youth sports leagues, and, above all, families—in too many of our cities may also have a hand in urban crime. Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, for instance, has argued that nonprofits “focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities” are linked to lower rates of violent crime in cities across the country. In a new Institute for Family Studies report, we turn our attention to the core institution of family. Drawing on the work of scholars like Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson—who found that “(f)amily structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of … urban violence across cities in the United States”—we explore the relationship between family structure and urban crime in the 21st century. Specifically, we address this question: How is family structure associated with crime, violent crime, and homicide rates in American cities—and with these outcomes in Chicago neighborhoods?

We find that cities are safer when two-parent families are dominant and more crime-ridden when family instability is common. The same story applies to the neighborhoods of Chicago. More specifically, we find the total crime rate is about 48% higher in cities that have above the median share of single-parent families, compared to cities that have fewer single-parent families. That difference is even larger with respect to violent crime and homicide, specifically, with cities above the median level of single parenthood experiencing 118% higher rates of violent crime and 255% higher rates of homicide. In the Windy City, relying on an analysis of census tract level data, our research indicates that neighborhoods above the median fraction of single-parent-headed households experienced 137% higher total crime rates, 226% higher violent crime rates, and 436% higher homicide rates.

When controlling for additional factors such as racial composition, poverty rates, and educational attainment levels, we find that the association between family structure and total crime rates, as well as violent crime rates, in cities across the United States remains statistically significant. However, the association between family structure and homicide in cities does not. In Chicago, the links between family structure and both violent crime and homicide rates at the neighborhood level were significant, net of controls, but not the total crime rate. In addition to the question of whether there exists a statistical relationship between family structure and crime—a question we generally answer in the affirmative—this study also offers possible answers to the question of what might explain the relationships between family instability and crime.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of social science research, we theorize that this relationship is likely a byproduct of some mix of the heightened risk of family instability in the socialization of young children and the role that father absence plays in providing less guidance and oversight for adolescent and young adult males.

Particularly in light of the pre-existing literature on the role of family structure in various life outcomes, these findings may have important implications for policymakers. They suggest the need to encourage more young Americans—particularly those living in vulnerable neighborhoods with both high rates of violence and out-of-wedlock childbearing—toward forming strong and stable families in marriage.

Washington, DC: Institute for Family Studies, 2023. 21p.

By Dennis Cheng

Extortion has become an endemic problem in Central America. To provide a comprehensive response to this crime, the countries of the region have begun to make use of asset forfeiture, a tool that reduces the financial assets available to organized crime.

This paper describes how this legal procedure has evolved and been applied in the region, sets out the advantages it offers in the fight against organized crime and proposes strategies for better implementation.

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

By Graham Denyer Willis

Shows how in Sao Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of normal killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups the police and organized crime both operating according to parallel logics of murder.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. 216p

By Ardi Janjeva, Alexandria Reid and Anton Moiseienko.

The distribution of copyright-infringing audio-visual content, also known as ‘piracy’, is a major profit-generating crime that offers significant opportunities for criminal gain. The idea that piracy is solely carried out by otherwise law-abiding, opportunistic individuals is no longer tenable. Piracy is an increasingly professionalised crime, yet the current response lacks the required urgency on numerous levels, from an incomplete understanding of pirate business models to the often low priority attached to tackling it by law enforcement agencies, regulators and online service providers and the limited awareness in the financial sector about intellectual property crime. This report explores how criminals make money from piracy and provides recommendations for how the UK government, law enforcement and private sector stakeholders can decrease the profitability of doing so. Its recommendations are addressed to UK audiences, but almost all of them are internationally applicable. This is particularly true of those aimed at rights holders, the financial sector and online service providers working across multiple geographies.

London: Royal United Services Institute, 2021. 84p.