Main Trends in the Development of Criminological Theory and Crime Prevention Practice in the Context of the Digitalization of Society

The digitalization of society, associated with a large-scale introduction of digital technologies in all socially relevant spheres, not only brough about positive changes, but also had a powerful effect on the transformation of crime and criminogenic factors. This has created an urgent need for understanding the prospects of criminological science in the new conditions, for strengthening its role in ensuring national security, for improving its methodology in new ways. The authors define key criminal threats to the security of the digital space: a rapid increase of its criminalization due to the features attractive for criminals (trans-national character of cyberspace, widespread anonymization and encryption, digital means of committing crimes and concealing their traces, etc.); the emergence and widening of criminogenic zones of cyberspace, with DarkNet holding a special place; the use of «digital» methods of resisting law enforcement, including cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. It is concluded that the abovementioned circumstances make it necessary to change the methodology of criminological research and the practice of law enforcement. The collection and generalization of information from publicly available digital sources, its analysis with the use of big data acquire a special research potential connected with the possibility of finding hidden regularities and obtaining criminological knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere. The digitalization of society creates conditions for the introduction of a preventive model of law enforcement based on predictive analysis methods. It becomes possible to quickly detect signs of criminal activity that require both a specific reaction of law enforcement and systemic managerial decisions. It also opens broad prospects for predicting individual criminal behavior by analyzing the Internet activity of specific individuals. The authors then highlight the most relevant directions for the development of criminological theory and the practice of crime prevention in the conditions of the digitalization of society.

Do Migrant and Native Robbers Target Different Places?

The spatial pattern of crime has been a central theme of criminological research. Recently, the spatial variation in the crime location choice of offenders by different population groups has been gaining more attention. This study addresses the issue of whether the spatial distribution of migrant robbers’ crime location choices is different from those of native robbers. Further, what factors contribute to such differences? Using a kernel density estimation and the discrete spatial choice modeling, we combine the offender data, POI data, and mobile phone data to explain the crime location choice of the street robbers who committed offenses and were arrested from 2012 to 2016 in ZG City, China. The results demonstrate that the crime location choices between migrant robbers and native robbers have obvious spatial differences. Migrant robbers tend to choose the labor-intensive industrial cluster, while native robbers prefer the old urban areas and urban villages. Wholesale markets, sports stadiums, transportation hubs, and subway stations only affect migrant robbers’ crime location choices, but not native robbers’. These results may be attributable to the different spatial awareness between migrant robbers and native robbers. The implications of the findings for criminological theory and crime prevention are discussed.

Gang Research in the Twenty-First Century

For nearly a century, gang scholarship has remained foundational to criminological theory and method. Twenty-first-century scholarship continues to refine and, in some cases, supplant long-held axioms about gang formation, organization, and behavior. Recent advances can be traced to shifts in the empirical social reality and conditions within which gangs exist and act. We draw out this relationship—between the ontological and epistemological—by identifying key macrostructural shifts that have transformed gang composition and behavior and, in turn, forced scholars to revise dominant theoretical frameworks and analytical approaches. These shifts include large-scale economic transformations, the expansion of punitive state interventions, the proliferation of the Internet and social media, intensified globalization, and the increasing presence of women and LGBTQ individuals in gangs and gang research. By introducing historically unprecedented conditions and actors, these developments provide novel opportunities to reconsider previous analyses of gang structure, violence, and other related objects of inquiry. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Criminological Security as the Ideological Basis of the Theory and Practice of Counteracting Crime

This work aims mainly at presenting the basic concepts of criminological security in the note form, which is reasonably evaluated as a complex scientific category and a real social phenomenon in criminology. Criminological security is considered to be the ideological basis and concept of the modern Russian criminal policy, made to set a new and truly humanistic vector for the development of the theory and practice of counteracting crime. The author believes that the development of the theoretical concepts of the criminological security has led to the emergence of a separate direction within the framework of national security — criminological security, which is structurally a part of the state and public security. The article defines criminological security and characterizes its functions, analyzes internal and external threats to criminological security. The idea that criminological security has formed into a private criminological theory and is an important component of the national security is proved. The indicators and trends of crime for the period from 1991 to 2020 are given.

The influence of changing reward of electronic consumer goods on burglary and theft offences in Western market-based countries in the years prior to and during the crime drop

It is widely recognised that burglary and theft offence trends have broadly moved in parallel in ‘Western’ market-based countries since the 1950s. Most researchers have focussed on the trend from the early 1990s onwards, when burglary and theft offence rates plummeted. One major proposed explanation for this trend, relates to improved security. This paper draws on the longitudinal variations in reward of electronic consumer goods to propose a complementary account. This argument is supported by criminological theory, empirical evidence, and historical trends of specific property crime offences. The paper concludes by explaining that reward and security operate in partnership to influence the opportunity for crime, which provides an optimal account for burglary and theft offence trends over the last 40 years.

Proactive Alliance: Combining policing and counselling psychology

The philosophy of community-oriented policing (COP) has been widely adopted by police departments around the world and has important benefits, such as improving community members’ satisfaction with police and their perceptions of police legitimacy. However, implementing COP is challenging. Police departments report difficulties obtaining the support of officers on the ground and knowing how best to engage communities—which often contain multiple, overlapping, and sometimes competing groups within the same geographic area—in effective problem-solving and crime prevention. This article describes Proactive Alliance, an innovative training program that draws from criminological theory andevidence-based principles in counselling psychology to teach police officers specific, immediately applicable techniques to establish rapport and long-term working relationships with community stakeholders. The training addresses two key challenges of COP: building meaningful collaboration across diverse communities and empowering frontline officers to become change agents in pursuit of the “co-production” of public safety. It builds on the original theory of broken windows policing, which emphasized the importance of harnessing police officers’ personalities to facilitate successful community engagement and crime prevention, and provides practical tools based on those used by mental health professionals to enable officers to engage in active listening, to connect, and to problem-solve with the community while protecting their own well-being. We conclude by describing the potential of Proactive Alliance to strengthen COP and evidence-based policing more broadly.

The Meaning of the Victim–Offender Overlap for Criminological Theory and Crime Prevention Policy

Criminological theory developed without an expectation of a victim–offender overlap. Among most crime theorists and policymakers, to solve crime it is necessary to solve the criminal offender. Modern choice theories took a different view by evolving from victim data, treating target vulnerability as essential to the criminal act and with full awareness of the overlap. Here, we discuss the emphasis on offenders in criminology as being inconsistent with the facts of the overlap. The evidence shows that the victim–offender overlap is consistently found, implying that offending and victimization arise for similar substantive reasons and that offenders act principally in response to targets. This conclusion has important implications. First, any theory of crime that cannot logically predict the overlap as a fact may be subject to falsification. Second, the choice perspective suggests a theory of precautionary behavior, which urges a policy agenda that encourages actions against crime by potential targets. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.