Disruption of terrorism and organised crime

As with crime in general, there is a need to bring interventions against organised crime and terrorism into sharper focus. This process can be aided by asking these key questions:

• How can we generate innovative new interventions in taking forward the arms race with adaptable, persistent and often well-resourced criminals?
• How do the interventions work?
• How do we know that they have been properly implemented?
• How do we know that the evaluations are a fair test?
• How do we diagnose failures so we can learn from them, and share and replicate success stories adjusted to new problems and contexts?

Finding answers to these questions necessitates articulating some key principles, based on evidence and tested theory, in a clear way which supports intervention, evaluation and intelligent replication. But some conceptual foundations are needed too, including clearly-defined terms.

The vernacular term ‘disruption’ is defined (Merriam-Webster) as ‘a break or interruption in the normal course or continuation of some activity, process etc.’ This is hard to improve on except to note that for present usage there is normally some thwarting of purpose or utility. But we can break the concept down into several elements: operational, environmental, and strategic-existential. (Note that the concept of disruption used in a more general sense is also relevant to technological and social change, where, say, some innovation such as the Worldwide Web or cryptocurrency suddenly and radically changes the viability of business models or the balance between offenders versus the security side. This is more relevant to evolutionary approaches including arms races, and crime and security futures.)

The intervention principles of disruption that follow are described in terms of action targeted on organised crime groups and networks (OCGs), but apply equally to terrorists:

Operational disruptions

Environmental disruptions

Strategic-Existential disruptions

• Disrupting OCG’s business models – remove the social/economic niche that they exploit, boosting legitimate business opportunities (ecological concepts including niche are discussed here and at various places under evolution, crime and security)
• Creating distrust within OCGs, and across criminal networks, and between OCGs and their clients
• Diminishing the resilience of OCGs – making it harder for them to recover from disruption
• Diminishing the adaptive/innovative capacity of OCGs – reducing their potential for circumventing constraints, transferring to less challenging value chains (e.g. from drugs to wildlife crime), and expanding to exploit new opportunities
• Diminishing OCGs (number/quality of members leaving is greater than numbers being recruited) 
• Detaching OCGs from supportive subcultures 
• Dismantling OCGs – breaking up the organisation

If you have any suggestions for additional disruptions, please contact.

The disruption principles complement the Ds Framework (Deter, Detect, Detain, Deny, Demotivate etc). These characterise ways of influencing individual offenders – whether or not they are members of organised groups and networks – and indeed the corporate-level offender.