Assessing European futures in an age of reflexive security
Tom Vander Beken & Kristof Verfaillie
This is a preliminary version of an article that has been accepted for publication in the journal “Policing and Society” on February 15, 2010. The journal can be found online at
Abstract
The past decade, European assessments of organised crime have evolved into strategic future-oriented intelligence systems. Policymakers want to be informed about coming organised crime threats and challenges. We use the concepts of reflexive government (Dean, 1999) and reflexive security (Rasmussen, 2001, 2004) to explore this shift in EU policing, and suggest that strategic planning in the field of organised crime control might benefit from the use of scenario methodologies. We focus on the assumptions that underpin scenario exercises and we outline how they might be developed.
Keywords :Organised crime, reflexive security, scenario methodologies
Introduction
More than a decade ago, in a double issue on law and technology (Dator and Halbert 1996), Richter H. Moore Jr. (1996) published a paper that deals with twenty-first century organised crime and the challenges it entails for criminal justice systems. Moore’s prototypical assessment of the future of organised crime paints a rather grim picture: ‘twenty-first century technology will lead to nightmarish global criminal enterprises that cannot be controlled by the traditional criminal law and judicial systems of the nation-state’ (Moore 1996: 186). According to Moore, future criminal activities will be more profitable than ever. Criminal organizations will invest in legitimate companies and get involved in financial organizations and multinational corporations management. Computer experts and financial experts will be of vital importance to criminal enterprises focussed on computer extortion and various kinds of computer fraud. Criminal organizations will control satellites, providing them with important communication and tracking facilities. Organised crime will furthermore be involved in trafficking human organs, children, waste, nuclear weapons, technology theft, intellectual property rights violations (counterfeiting) and sexual exploitation. According to Moore, the only reasonable solution to counter these future crime trends, is the establishment of an international criminal code and a global criminal justice system.
What Moore did in 1996 may not have been taken seriously by decision makers then, but it certainly is today. Organised crime assessments that are explicitly oriented towards the future have become a demand of many policymakers in and across Europe (Verfaillie and Vander Beken 2008ab). Moore’s assessment is more than a fictitious story about what the future of organised crime might look like in the 21st century. He analysed specific information resources and trends, i.e. developments he picked up in 1996 and then followed ‘to their logical conclusions’ (Moore 1996: 185).
Future-oriented exercises of this kind raise two sets of questions: (i) what information should be gathered for the assessment of organised crime? (ii) how should this information be analysed to make statements about the future of organised crime? The argument that we will develop evolves around both questions and can be summarized along these lines: future-oriented assessments of organised crime should not be limited to extrapolations of the current trends that can be discerned in police data. Surely such exercises can be valuable, but at the same time they might impose important limitations on the strategic planning process of police organizations. Police data inevitably represent a particular perspective on (organised) crime. A perspective which depends, among other things, on police strategies, activities and resources, criminal policies and definitions, public sensibilities and the reporting of organised crime. From an analytical and strategic point of view, this perspective on organised crime might not contain sufficient relevant data to understand the problem anddynamics of organised crime. Based on police data, law enforcement might for instance establish the involvement of organised crime in legitimate businesses. These data, however, do not necessarily allow them to make statements about the extent of this problem, why and how certain organised crime groups became involved in these activities and whether, or under which conditions, these activities are likely to endure. In addition, strategic planners that focus exclusively on police data will only be able to explore organised crime activities or issues which are already known to them. If strategic planners furthermore adhere to the idea that the future of criminal activities should be thought of in terms of a continuation of the past or present, and extrapolate or calculate probabilities about future organised crime activities based on the police data that is available to them, this too will limit the scope of assessing organised crime for strategic planning purposes.
In sum: the central issue we should address here is ‘perspective’: how do strategic planners perceive organised crime, and how do they expect organised crime to evolve? Given the importance of ‘perspective’ to law enforcement strategies, we will argue that it might be useful for law enforcement agencies and policymakers to introduce scenario tools to their strategic planning process. We will focus on the assumptions that underpin scenario methodologies and we will outline how scenarios might be developed in the field of organised crime assessments. First, however, we will explain why and how European policymakers became interested in future-oriented assessments of organised crime. This future-oriented focus can be understood in terms of important trends in contemporary policing such as risk assessment, proactiveness, intelligence-based decision-making and transnational crime control. Policymakers and the law enforcement community want to be informed about coming threats and organised crime related challenges so that they can take appropriate preventive action. We will argue that the European Union (EU) thus expects its law enforcement community to provide ‘strategic warning’. Strategic warning methodologies are a much-debated issue in security studies and intelligence communities, and we believe that the assessment of organised crime, and the use of scenario methodologies in this process, might benefit from those debates.
1A growing need for prospective organised crime assessments in the EU
Organised crime appeared on the policy agenda of European decision makers in the beginning of the nineties, when it was seen as a transnational, European problem and no longer a concern to individual member states (van Duyne and Vander Beken 2009). Consequently, in November 1993, the European Council decided that an annual strategic report on organised crime (Organised Crime Situation Report – OCSR) was to be drafted. The OSCR would allow policymakers to better understand the problem of organised crime within the European Union and would improve knowledge based policymaking in this field. However, at the end of the nineties, the OCSR was criticized within the EU. Policymakers wanted a strategic report, produced for the purpose of strategic planning. Therefore the focus of the report had to shift from the description of current and past criminal cases to the assessment of threats and risks related to future developments in (organised) crime and the implications of these developments for law enforcement within the EU (Council of the European Union 2000). On March 13, 2001 the Commission and Europol issued a Joint Report entitled ‘Towards a European Strategy to Prevent Organised Crime’(Council of the European Union 2001a), which proposed the development of an information collection plan reflecting a knowledge-management process from a multidisciplinary perspective. In the autumn of 2001, the Belgian Presidency proposed an action plan to convert the OCSR into an annual strategic report for planning purposes with a primary focus on the assessment of relevant threats and risks, and on recommendations related to combating and preventing organised crime (Council of the European Union 2001b). As the Action Plan seemed to jump to threat assessment methodologies before solid and reliable information bases were developed within the EU (von Lampe 2005), it was never put into practice.
In 2004, the The Hague Programme (Council of the European Union 2004), reaffirmed the importance of intelligence-led law enforcement at the EU level regarding organised crime and called again for a forward looking approach to fight organised crime in a more pro-active manner. On October 3rd 2005, the Council concluded that from 1 January 2006 onwards, Europol was to produce an Organised Crime Threat Assessment (OCTA) instead of its annual Organised Crime Situation Reports (Council of the European Union 2005), as an important step in the development of a common intelligence model by Europol and the member states. Since 2006 three OCTA’s have been presented. The 2008 OCTA expresses the ambition of this report: ‘To support decision-makers in the best possible way, the OCTA provides a well-targeted qualitative assessment of the threat from OC. The OCTA is based on a multi-source approach, including law enforcement and non-law enforcement contributions. These include various European agencies as well as the private sector. A specific emphasis is put on elaborating the benefits of an intensified public-private partnership. The OCTA helps to close the gap between strategic findings and operational activities. The OCTA helps to identify the highest priorities, which will then be effectively tackled with the appropriate law enforcement instruments’ (Europol 2008: 9).
This brief history of European organised crime policy (and policing) reveals important shifts and strategic assumptions: Organised crime should not (can not) be controlled by individual member states but requires a transnational, multi-agency approach, with a particular emphasis on public-private partnerships. Law enforcement strategy building needs to be based on a multi-source approach, i.e. requires more than analysis of police data. Reports describing the past criminal (and law enforcement) activities should be (and have been) replaced by assessments that have forward looking and future oriented ambitions. ‘Prevention’ and ‘multidisciplinary actions’ are keywords in the European discourse. Not the organised crime situation is of interest, but the possible risk or threat of organised crime to society.
2The problem of ‘risk’ in the assessment of organised crime
The European Union’s approach to organised crime subscribes to what Maguire (2000) has defined as intelligence-led policing (see also: Heaton 2000, Cope 2004, Sheptycki 2005, Maguire and John 2006, Ratcliffe and Guidetti 2008, Ratcliffe, 2008): ‘a strategic, future-oriented and targeted approach to crime control, focusing upon the identification, analysis and ‘management’ of persisting and developing ‘problems’ or ‘risks’ (which may be particular people, activities or areas), rather than on the reactive investigation and detection of individual crimes’ (Maguire 2000: 315).
Maguire discussed the emergence of intelligence-led policing in the context of recent theories about the nature of crime control in late modern societies, particularly Ericson and Haggerty’s seminal portrayal of the core work of the (public) police as ‘risk business’. In Policing the Risk Society,Ericson and Haggerty (1997) challenge Bittner’s influential perspective on Western police, with its focus on order maintenance and coercion (Bittner 1970). In the risk society, police have evolved into knowledge workers or information brokers: their defining capacity is to gather information about security risks (e.g. particular populations) with new surveillance technologies, and communicate this information to other institutions (e.g. insurance companies, welfare organizations). These institutions too operate based on a risk paradigm and require information from the police for their own risk management. It is precisely this demand for information about security risks from a variety of risk-oriented institutions that has had a profound transforming effect on police structures, routines, strategies and intelligence requirements.
Ericson and Haggerty’s perspective of police as information brokers, involved in risk management and risk communication, provides an interesting framework to analyze the policing of organised crime at the EU level. Following their argument, however, three questions emerge: (i) what are security risks? (ii) how can police produce knowledge about security risks? (iii) what does it mean to assess and manage security risks (from a multi-agency perspective)?
The European OCTA’s seem to be based on the assumption that security risks are risks in themselves: strategic planners believe it is possible to collect sufficient relevant data about organised crime and use this data to assess and manage security risks in an objective manner. Based on various conceptual models, they distill crime trends from known past criminal cases. These trends are then used for forward looking purposes and strategy building (for risk assessment applications in organised crime assessments see Vander Beken 2004). The assessment of risk thus requires the introduction of more technocratic and expert-based forms of probabilistic or actuarial risk calculation, focused on generating quantitative estimates of trends, patterns and impacts of crime events.
In the assessment of organised crime on the European level, ‘risk’ is conceived in one particular way, i.e. as the outcome of a quantitative calculation of a future given. Elsewhere (Verfaillie et al 2006, Verfaillie and Vander Beken 2008a and Verfaillie and Vander Beken 2008b), we have argued that this perspective on risk, and thus the future of organised crime, suggests that organised crime will evolve towards a certain future, or as Moore (1996) put it: that trends can be followed to their logical conclusion. The conception of the future as a continuation, a projection, of past trends is a problem in the field of organised crime assessments (see also: Sheptycki 2004). Strategic analysts might not have sufficient data to discern sensible trends, patterns or frequencies, and the quality of these analyses is highly dependent on the quality of the available data. Predictive analysis and forecasting methods using multivariate data, such as linear regression against time and econometric methods, are predicated on the ability to demonstrate causal relationships between identified variables. This means that strategic analysts first and foremost need to have a clear conceptual focus or idea about the nature of the problem at hand, what variables to use, and how these variables interact or should be connected. This might be difficult in light of criminal activities, like organised crime, that can be covert, and often seem ephemeral and fluid, but there is more. Complexity scientists have recently advanced this debate as they argue that no traditional causal (i.e. mechanistic or determined) relationships between environment, agency and criminal activity can be found to explain the dynamics in organised crime (e.g. Van Calster 2006). As such, complexity scientists do not discard the idea of science nor do they challenge the idea that we can describe and explain social practices like organised crime. Quite the contrary. What they challenge is the idea of mechanistic cause-effect relations[1]. Crime is the emergent outcome of complex interactions, and can thus be understood in terms of narrative analysis or interpretative (ethnographic) case study approaches (e.g. Van Calster 2005, 2006). We can abandon the idea of prediction as a goal of inquiry without abandoning science or the need to come to a profound qualitative understanding of criminal contexts and interactions (see also: Lippens 2006). In policy times obsessed with controlling the future, it is important that we avoid identifying future-oriented action and proactiveness with prediction or that we use predictive statements as a legitimate basis for preemptive law enforcement action (Verfaillie and Vander Beken, 2008b). When discussing the future of organised crime, the challenges and threats we distinguish, are very much based on our current understanding of organised crime. The past 60 years, this knowledge base, our understanding of organised crime, has changed considerably, both in empirical as in theoretical terms (Levi, 2003; Edwards and Levi, 2008). Even though scholars have come to develop perspectives that allow us to grasp organised crime in more meaningful ways than before, and even though our current perspectives and models clearly serve a meaningful analytical purpose today, they may not prove to be a useful guide tomorrow, for future developments. If, for instance, in the 1950s assessments had been made about future organised crime developments, planners would most likely have done so in light of assumptions grounded in the bureaucratic model. Similarly, contemporary planners will tend to perceive organised crime through the focus of network perspectives. In other words, the future of organised crime is inevitably our description of the future of organised crime. Consequently, a single, predetermined future that can be measured, assessed or predicted independent from our assumptions does not exist. Statements about the future of organised crime are a reflection of our current perception, our current understanding of organised crime.
Therefore, in addition to the problem of defining a clear analytical focus and acquiring sufficient qualitative data, forecasts are only meaningful if strategic planners and policymakers believe that established patterns of criminal behavior will remain stable and continue into the future (see also: Cavelty and Mauer 2009)[2].
The OCTA’s recognize the limitations of quantitative calculations based on law enforcement data to a certain extent. Policymakers find themselves faced with uncertainty and unpredictability, and they have tried to resolve these issues with the introduction of a multi-agency and multi-source approach. Though such perspectives are presented as answers to deal with uncertainty, they contain many elements of the former, more traditional approaches towards intelligence (Sheptycki and Ratcliffe 2008). As before, such approaches or strategies are based on the assumption that uncertainty can be overcome by developing new information cycles and focuses.