How to identify high-risk criminal networks? A review of the academic and grey literature

• In Event: Unpacking High-Risk Criminal Networks: Bridging Gaps in Identification, Assessment, and Prevention

Abstract

Europol and other European and non-European law enforcement and policy agencies increasingly refer to “high-risk criminal networks”. In 2024, for example, Europol published a report entitled “Decoding the EU’s most threatening criminal networks”, in which it identified the 821 most threatening criminal networks active in the EU. However, lacking an established method of identification, Europol left it to the Member States to identify the high-risk criminal networks in each national context. In a new, EU-funded project called “PREVENT” we aim to develop and test a method for identifying high-risk criminal networks. As a first step towards that goal, we have been conducting a review of the academic and grey literature, the results of which we discuss in this presentation.
Specifically, we have compared conceptualizations of risk and related concepts such as threat, vulnerability, consequences, and harm, and reviewed the relevant approaches to assessing each. We are considering not only publications concerning organized crime and criminal networks but also those from other disciplines and fields, including national security.
Our conclusion is that risk and the related concepts are defined differently across sources, but not always clearly, and are sometimes used interchangeably. To some extent the differences are reconcilable and depend on the disciplinary origin, but not uniformly so. Along those lines, the assessment methods developed by national security agencies, businesses, and police agencies also vary, with some of them suffering the limitations of quantitative reductionism. Despite these limitations, police agencies’ methods also attest to their increasing commitment to searching for tools to set strategic and tactical priorities through a more transparent, informed, and consistent decision-making process, which we intend to support with our work.

Authors

• Leen Gabriëls, Researcher at the Leuven Institute of Criminology, KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology, Belgium

• Victoria A. Greenfield, George Mason University

• Letizia Paoli, KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology