Weekly Blog: Scripting the crime and identifying the target

You’ll probably have noticed that this week, the Oscars took place. In the end, I chose sleep over staying up to watch the ceremony (my tolerance for sleep deprivation has, er, “decreased in inverse proportion” to my age). But as the fallout settles, I’ve been thinking about the movies.

Take the idea of a film script; say it’s a film about environmental crime. (The message flashes up at the beginning: “this is a true story…”) This film script has many scenes, over the course of which, a story develops. Then there’s the cast – all of whom have different roles with varying depths of involvement. Some only have bit parts – but their appearance might nevertheless be central to the plot – and then there are some that are present throughout.

The location of each scene depends on the characters’ particular activities (the forest, the tannery, the border crossing). The actors need “props” to carry out their roles, ranging from traditional traps to firearms, helicopters with obscured registrations and satellite phones.

With all this activity, we need to remember what binds the script and story together, changing hands on its complicated and covert journey from origin to destination. Whether it’s rhino horn, elephant ivory, tiger skin…I’ve realised that my favourite character would already be dead before the film starts.

This isn’t just a metaphor, but another way of looking at crime. For several years now, criminologists like Derek Cornish have been developing “crime scripts” which identify and isolate what criminal actors require to perfectly execute their parts –in terms of both tools and (spoken like a true thespian) “motivation”.

Each activity is broken down into “acts” like in a play or the scenes in our film. Reading through, you get a sequential chain of criminal decisions and behaviours, along with what is required to undertake each act successfully. So if the poaching of a tiger is one act or scene, to “perform” the act successfully, preparation activities are inherent: poachers gather local intelligence about tiger sightings; they identify the water holes the tiger has frequented; they block paths to all water holes but one, then poison water in the remaining hole, and so on.

So when you have your entire crime script – from poaching to end market – and the culmination of all of these acts, preparation activities and facilitators, you can identify intervention points throughout and say, “there’s a point where we can make a change”; and so, we hope, re-write the outcome of the film.

It might not be a typical “happy ending” – but at least one in which criminals are identified, investigated and prosecuted. Then, there will be other interventions that can deter – or even recruit into conservation.

At EIA, we believe it’s fundamental that the complexity of criminal networks is recognised – along with their ability to react, mutate and recover from enforcement efforts. Ultimately, crime is great at survival. Enforcement needs to be sensitive to this reality. Enforcement shouldn’t, for example, be “scripted” to the extent that law enforcement actions are announced publicly, in advance of being carried out! ¹

Picture 1

Neither should enforcement be content with arresting a courier or a trader and saying “job done”. Think about a criminal network, or some of the actors in our film. In the first picture, each person is a white bubble and their associations with each other are the blue links. Fair enough; but it doesn’t tell us much more than that. So, instead of going in blind and arresting the visible (and therefore probably superficial) members of the network, ensure your investigation is tailor-made for the appropriate target.

Result A

Maybe you need to target the people who control the flow of information into a network. These people are the “gatekeepers”; in Result A, they are bubbles flagged in red and then in pink (and so on in decreasingly darker shading, until those people with the least control over information). This can include people who can block those on the periphery communicating with more centrally placed individuals.

If however, you want to identify the people who have the best access to other parts of the network, then you get a slightly different result (Result B). Or, if you want to identify the people who have the strongest links within the network due to their links with well-connected people (these are “people who know people” and likely extremely influential), then it’s Result C, which is different again.

Result B

So where do you want to make the biggest impact? Do you want to disrupt, fragment or shatter the network? Identifying the different roles in a network provides subtly different options for developing an investigation, and a way of maximising limited resources. It enables the targeting of those players whose removal will most effectively halt criminal activity.

Result C

Yes, networks will no doubt be more complicated than this example, and they can be loose and fluid, and not always easy to identify. But that’s where commitment and an intelligence-led approach comes in. And now world leaders have now made a commitment to protect wild tigers – let’s have a screenplay with a difference. Who wins the award for best enforcement?  Who’s writing the script anyway?

 

 

 

 

 

Charlotte Davies

Intelligence Analyst

Reference ¹ CITES Secretariat, Report by the CITES Secretariat on its verification and assessment mission to China, 28 March-7 April 2007, CoP14 Doc. 52 Annex 7 (2007)

 

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Weekly Blog; Diaries of spirits departed…

I’ve been reading about a pangolin trafficking operation, described in a recent report by TRAFFIC Southeast Asia¹. Sabah Wildlife Department’s raid on a warehouse used by a pangolin trafficking syndicate recovered several logbooks used by the dealers. These books revealed that the criminals meticulously recorded their trafficking activities – being the details of approximately 22,200 pangolins, all of which they’d sourced and trafficked in less than two years. While providing a unique insight into the pangolin trade, this case really exemplifies what levels of organisation can be involved in wildlife trafficking.

And the status of pangolins, or scaly anteaters (see examples here) exemplifies the consequences of human encroachment, habitat degradation and destruction, over-hunting and poaching. Pangolins are poached because there are big markets for their body parts. Their characteristic scales are used in traditional medicine, their skins for clothing accessories, their meat for cuisine. There’s a variety of medicinal properties ascribed to pangolin derivatives, including pangolin foetus soup for sexual stamina. Perhaps the pangolin is a victim of not just human vanity and desire, but also of the human imagination.

When I began as an analyst I was started off in vehicle crime investigation. It’s considered a “volume crime” – chances are some of you are car-owners, so perhaps you’ve had a car stereo stolen – or even a whole car. Looking at volume crime is considered a good way to get analytical pups exploring trends, geographical clusters of crime, effects of the surrounding environment on incidence, and so on. Quite a lot of vehicle crime is opportunistic and depends heavily on the protection measures in place in particular locations. You could even call it “subsistence crime” as it involves stealing just enough from a vehicle to cover expenses like a drug habit, or stealing a car for a quick joy ride. Yet there’s also evidence suggesting large-scale, highly organised thefts to order, and a lucrative, transnational trade in stolen vehicles.

So if we’re looking for an example of volume crime in the wildlife trade, pangolins fit the bill. Certainly the pangolin trade is one of the starkest examples of the commodification of wildlife. They’re described as one of the most frequently-seized species in South East Asia. We’ve seen above that their body parts are put to multiple uses, and that there are different drivers for this demand: different industries all demand pangolin corpses. They are seized all over the region, both alive and dead, intact or in pieces, sometimes frozen for transportation purposes.  When seizures in excess of twenty tonnes are reported, as in Vietnam in early 2008, then this points to a lucrative, transnational trade of catastrophic proportions.

Poachers report that it’s increasingly difficult to find pangolins, and put this scarcity down to over-hunting. We know what happens next: when the “commodity” becomes rare, the price increases. This pushes up demand by bestowing a luxurious or elusive quality on to the product. Heightened demand drives more poaching, and the population crashes. This kind of scenario is reflected across the wildlife trade. It may help to explain why, by kilo, rhino horn is valued more highly than gold (gold being another natural substance that bewitches and fascinates us humans).

Likewise during the Tiger Campaign investigation to China in 2009, EIA found that tiger skin traders were expecting greater demand – and therefore profits – for tiger skins traded in the Chinese Year of the Tiger. Interestingly, these traders were also aware that there were very few wild tigers remaining – yet didn’t appear to let the “endangered species” factor deter them. Likewise, some pangolin poachers have said they believe that pangolins will become extinct – whilst adding that they can’t stop their activities, because they are too well paid.

I’ve read that the genus name for pangolin, Manis, means a departed spirit or ghost, or a corpse. At the moment, this appears grimly apt.

China’s Premier Wen Jiabao

EIA attended the recent International Tiger Forum in St Petersburg, Russia and heard Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao speak about the fight to save the wild tiger, and advocating the need for a change in human behaviour.  If I were to make a New Year’s wish for 2011, it would be for something similar. For a change in human consciousness to value wild over captive, the living over the dead. Some of the potential solutions to illegal trade are familiar. But they appear constrained by equally familiar stumbling blocks, like lack of investment and capacity, corruption, lack of communication, lack of trust. Where else have we encountered these issues? Across the illegal wildlife trade, across continents – even across different forms of crime. Let’s campaign to make these issues the ghosts – instead of pangolins, tigers, forests, and ultimately, ourselves. I hope in 2011, you’ll join EIA for the journey.

Charlotte Davies

Intelligence Analyst

Reference 1: Sandrine Pantel and Noorainie Awang Anak (2010). A preliminary assessment of pangolin trade in Sabah. TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

For further information see also: Sandrine Pantel and Chin Sing Yun (ed.) (2009) Proceedings of the Workshop on Trade and Conservation of Pangolins Native to South and Southeast Asia, 30 June-2 July 2008, Singapore Zoo, Singapore. TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

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