Are good neighbor’s worth more than far friends? Examining the role of propinquity in co-offending among outlaw motorcycle club members

• In Event: WG Organized Crime and Criminal Networks Panel 2. Organized crime groups

Abstract

Members of outlaw motorcycle groups (OMCGs) have been shown to be disproportionally engaged in criminal behavior, including serious and organized crime. Fellow OMCG members have furthermore been found to facilitate this criminal behavior both directly, by acting as co-offenders, and indirectly, by providing a moral climate and opportunity structure conducive to crime. Here, we focus on the former and study whether co-offending among OMCG members is best explained by shared membership of the same club and chapter or rather by geographical proximity. Co-offending with geographically distant fellow OMCG members is taken to signal strategy over convenience, and as indicative for the criminal exploitation of the OMCGs’ decentralized structure. To examine the driving factors of OMCG members’ co-offending in different types of crime, we apply Poisson Quadratic Assignment Procedure regression on the officially-registered co-offending data of a sample of 1,096 members of four of the most notorious Dutch OMCGs that have been banned in the period 2020 and 2022. Data on individuals’ chapter- and club membership and the location of the chapter’s clubhouse are used as propinquity measures. The results show that in their choice of co-offenders, club- and chapter membership rather than geographical propinquity predicts the frequency of co-offending among OMCG members.

Authors

• Sjoukje van Deuren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Tomáš Diviák, University of Manchester

• Arjan Blokland, NSCR