Network Analysis of Organized Crime Meetings as a Tool for the Identification of Leadership Positions

• In Event: Social Network Analysis as a Support for Law Enforcement Agencies against Organized Crime

Abstract

Law enforcement agencies have generally shown skepticism towards application of network analysis to organized crime, possibly due to the fact that most studies to date have analyzed data whose content was already well-known to the practitioners (e.g. phone intercepts). This paper demonstrates that the analysis of meetings attendance can provide insights on the internal structure of organized crime. Network centrality measures, and particularly betweenness centrality, can successfully predict the leadership role of the participants for more than 92% of the individuals in the network. The prediction is quite robust even in the first stages of the investigation and after only a few meetings, the analysis enables to correctly assess the leadership of more than 3 out of four individuals. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Author

• Francesco Calderoni, Università Cattolica - Transcrime