A method to detect criminal organizations from police data

Abstract

Definitional problems in the area of organized crime have traditionally led to measurement problems that trickle down the criminal justice system. This study quantifies the broad conception of organized crime in the Canadian legal context and examines the types of crimes in which criminal organizations (and organized criminals) are involved. To estimate incidents potentially related to organized crime, we combine police-reported data from Montreal, Canada, with the three components of organized crime as prescribed by the Criminal Code of Canada: size, offence severity and continuity. The strategy of combining models on a continuum, varying in co-offending unit size, as well as offence severity provides both restrictive and inclusive estimates, accounting for the main discrepancy dividing scholarly and policy assessments of organized crime. Results showed that from 2005 to 2009, the extent and severity of incidents potentially related to organized crime that emerged from the three family of models proposed varied, ranging from 184 to 2086 incidents. The models also showed variations in incident rates across crime classification types with most organized crime incidents attributed to property and violent offences. This study is one of the first to propose a set of methods to detect incidents potentially related to organized crime using police data and to illustrate the potential implications of restrictive and inclusive measures for estimating its prevalence.