Introduction
Last week we looked at problems
faced by law enforcement agencies in the interdiction of organised
crime. Criminologists and other researchers, though their aims are
different, face analagous problems. Law enforcement agencies have
an overriding aim of gathering evidence relevant to the conviction
of individuals in the courts. Criminologists are interested in the
structure of criminal organisation and subcultures and the motives
of participants.
The use of standard social
science research methods such as interviewing or social surveys
face formidible problems. Two in particular are worth discussing
Access
Much social research starts from
the proposition that the rearcher is in a more powerful position
than the person or group being researched. There is, therefore, an
emphasis on research ethics and the informed consent of those
being researched. Medical research is the obvious example. If you
are patient and the doctor asks you to join a group to test a new
drug relevant to your illness then it is right that your consent
should be clear. Much social science research is similar. Well
funded, government sponsored research into unemployed or homeless
youth and their various criminal activities is certainly an
example of powerful institutions researching the powerless,
But organised crime research is
rather different. Here it is the group being researched which is
are in a powerful position. The idea of approaching a leading
member of the Mafia and beginning your research by presenting him
with an ‘ethics form’ securing his written consent to being
interviewed is probably not the best way to begin. Furthermore the
personal safety of the researcher may be an issue in some
circumstances. It is not a good idea to get into a
misunderstanding such than the people you are researching come to
the conclusion that you are some sort of police ondercover agent.
But there are other issues which
impact on the research process. Members of organised crime groups
may be unwilling to identify themselves as such at least until
they are sure about the motives and ‘honesty’ of the
researcher. A great deal of time may have to be spent by the
researcher in demonstrating their credentials – basically that
they are not an informant. It may be more appropriate for the
researcher to disguise his or her motives; to present themselves,
for example, as writing a book on a particular area of the city,
or on the life of a particular community rather than about
organised crime as such. The care with which the research project
must be planned militates against any simplified notion of ‘informed
consent’ A crucial consideration will be for the researcher to
demonstrate that no information is being collected which, in the
hands of the law enforcement agencies, could lead to the
identification and arrest of individuals.
Others, such as the victims of
organised crime may present access problems in a similar way to
the criminals themselves. Victims of protection rackets, consumers
of illegal drugs and many others may be reluctant to talk to
strangers about their lives.
Of course, organised crime is not
the only area of social science research where access presents a
problem. Those involved in the perpetration of rape, domestic
violence or the victims of these crimes may be reluctant to talk
to researchers just as they may be reluctant to talk to police.
High status business and corporate criminals may be very difficult
to access.
Representativeness
In a similar way a whole raft of
social survey methods are ruled out as far as organised crime is
concerned. Anyone imagining they are going to go round
administering a questionnaire to a representative sample of major
drug traffickers is out of their head. There is no such thing as a
‘representative sample’ in this area. A researcher seeking to
interview in depth or even administer a questionnaire to members
of organised crime groups will only have access to populations
that are in no way amenable to statistical sampling methods. You
may get permission to interview convicted organised criminals in
prison. They will probably be willing to talk, though without much
in the way of checking the accuracy of what they say. The visit of
a researcher, especially if bringing cigarettes, may brighten up
the otherwise dull day of prison routine. But these are the guys
that got caught; they are in no way a representative sample! The
researcher who does fieldwork in the community where organised
crime operates will be very dependent on ‘snowballing’
techniques (getting one interviewee to introduce you to others who
may be similarly inclined to talk). There is no suggestion that
these are a representative sample.
The British criminologist, Dick
Hobbs, summed up the issue very neatly a few years ago
Until gangsters, armed robbers,
fraudsters and their ilk indicate their enthusiasm for
questionnaires or large scale social surveys, ethnographic
research, life histories, oral histories, biographies,
autobiographies and journalistic accounts will be at a premium.
Thus the methods of the
criminologist will be more similar to those of the detective and
the investigative journalist. For this reason it may be useful to
compare them in terms of methods of information gathering
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problems of cross national or
comparative methods
The lack of plausibility of
normal research methods means thaat big cross-national comparative
studies of organised crime are few and far between. Apart from the
issues discussed above there may be conflicting definitions of
organised crime activity between jurisdictions (for example the
minimum size and continutiy of activity for a group to be defined
as organised crime rather than some other form of criminal gang)
In 2002 the United Nations
(Office on Drugs and Crime) attempted a cross national survey of
the structure and prominence of different varieties of criminal
organisation involving forty criminal groups across sixteen
countries (This document is mentioned in the lecture
on globalisation) You can read the document here.
The UN researchers couldn’t
survey the criminal organisations directly so they had to survey
the law enforcement organisations whose knowledge of criminal
organisations might not, as the UN admitted, be necessarily
representative
“The level of prominence of
the organized crime groups in question was to be determined by,
among other factors, the level of media coverage of that group
and the attention it had received by the police or prosecution
services. Admittedly this was an imperfect method, relying on
the subjective judgement of those completing the survey. While
of course other criminal groups which were more effective in
their methods of operation and thus would not have received
attention in the media or a visit from the police would not be
covered, there would also only presumably be sketchy information
about their activities in the public realm. In the end
information on 40 specific criminal groups was collected.”
(page 16)
Obviously that groups with a
particular type of structure that law enforcement agencies were
best at penetrating would be disproportionately represented. For
reasons we have discussed in previous lectures these are likely to
be the traditional and hierarchically organised groups rather than
modern network structures. It might not be surprising therefore
that the researchers found the single largest number of groups
were in the traditional rigid hierarchy mould.
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Cops, journalists and
criminologists
Cops (or other law enforcement
agencies) are all involved in the business of seeking to gain
information about individuals and organisations which are not
immediately visible and which can be expected to resist such
knowledge gathering.
law enforcement agencies:
police detectives, customs and
excise, security services etc., have most legal powers. Among
their legal powers are those to conduct suveillance, telephone
tapping, to demand records of internet transactions such as email,
to run informants, to do deals with ‘supergrasses’ (though the
latter may be a power reserved to judges and prosecutors). Law
enforcement has one overriding interest: that of securing
convictions against individuals in the criminal courts. They are
interested in such issues as criminal subcultures and structures
of organisations only to the extent that it aids this task. Of
course, knowledge organisational structures is often crucial. We
have already discussed the RICO legislation in the US oriented to
convicting the heads of organised crime groups who avoid
committing crime themselves. In such circumstances cops spend a
lot of time working out precisely what the organisational
structure is. Look, for example, at the film Donnie Brasco, in
which the FBI handlers seem to spend most of their time piecing
together the information that Brasco provides in large wall charts
plotting the structure of Mafia organisation. Because of their
information gathering skills and legal powers friendly cops are
useful to both journalists and criminologists. A very useful form
of information that cops could provide would be the transcripts of
police interviews with suspects or even of telephone taps. The
legal regime in most countries makes this a very rare and
hazardous process. Knowledge that interview transcripts had ended
up in the hands of journalists in particular may well prejudice
the outcome of a criminal trial. More general ‘tip offs’ are
more likely.
journalists:
like cops have a focus on
individuals more so perhaps than the criminologist. Even if a
journalist is interested in the structure and subculture of
criminal organisation newspapers and broadcast media need some
personal drama and interest! but also interested in changing
structure of organisations (‘Triads moving in etc) some good
journos very informative (e.g. Tony Thompson) criminals will talk
to journalists to unburden themselves or seek notoriety and more
flexible than supergrass situation. Journalists often thus get key
information. Cops want it and try to get the courts to subpoena
it. Journos need to protect sources which otherwise would dry up.
Cops and journalists may have a particular interest in each other
because they have similar investigative skills and are both, by
contrast with the criminologist, often interested in individuals;
the cop to put them behind bars and the journalist to ‘scoop’
their story. Cops may be interested in where a journalist got
their information. Much information can be exchanged as part of a
mutual process of ‘favours’ but occasionally the pressures of
investigation may lead cops to go to court and get an order
forcing the journalist to reveal their sources. Journalists must
resist this because of course their sources would soon dry up if
it were known that interviews or documents given in strictest
secrecy were likely to nevertheless end up in the hands of the
police. This problem of course extends far outside the area of
organised crime to many forms of ‘whistleblowers’ and civil
servants who leak secret government documents to journalists in
violation of the Official Secrets Act. Very occasionally
journalists, or newspaper editors, go to prison for a period
rather than reveal their sources. Most cases where they do are in
the latter category rather than organised crime investigation.
criminologists:
are mainly interested in the
structure and subculture of criminal organisation, social
background and lifestyle of offenders, why particular types of
people get involved in crime etc. They not interested in
individuals although of course individuals are the main sources of
information: you can’t interview an organisation! As Dick Hobbs
pointed out in the quote above “ethnographic research, life
histories, oral histories, biographies, autobiographies and
journalistic accounts will be at a premium.” This means
criminologists not only interviewing and moving among criminals
but also reading their biographies and journalistic accounts,
looking for patterns and recurring themes in individual accounts
(e.g. similar accounts of development of drugs trade: when did you
get into drugs etc) Field work and participant observation
(ethnography) are major sources of information. While the
criminologist is less interested in details of individuals which
might sell newspapers or make exiting TV programmes there is a
considerable overlap, particularly in participant observation,
with the work of investigative journalists. Informal collaboration
and swapping of information may take place. Though a criminologist
doing participant observation doesn’t want their cover blown by
some headline-catching scoop based on information which could only
have come from them!
Police collaboration with
criminologists may be similarly informal. In the UK cops giving
interview transcripts to researchers is probably very rare. One
very important case in the US was the extent to which
criminologist Donald Cressey based his famous book Theft of The
Nation on the police interviews with Joseph Valachi [link] Cressey
was aware of the methodological problem that the outcome of such
interviews is already structured by police-offender interactions
before it reaches the researcher.
“What an informant or
informer says is true is not necessarily what an observer says
is true. And what a law-enforcement officer says he heard on a
wire-tap or a 'bug' is not necessarily what the speaker intended
to convey in the conversation which was overheard.”
Cressey's archeological analogy
Notwithstanding his awareness of
the problem, Cressey’s book Theft of The Nation was criticised
as being too dependent on the Valachi interviews which themselves
exaggerated the ‘corporate’ structure of the Italian-American
Mafia at that time. Nevertheless he was very aware of the type of
problems we have noted above. Cressey pointed out that the
researcher was faced with the problem of gaining information on
the structure of an organisation from individuals in whose
interest it usually was to deny the very existence of such an
organisation and their own part in its working. The mafia does not
file annual company reports and
“…informants are not
available for interview, and there is no known way to observe
the everyday interactions of organised criminals with each
other, with other criminals, or with non-criminals. These facts
of life pose serious methodological problems for the social
scientist who would learn something about the norms, values, and
rules of organised criminal society, because such phenomena...
are readily observable only in the context of interaction.”
Cressey drew an analogy between
his work and that of an archeologist. The latter looks at the
physical remains of past civilisations and tries to infer
something about their social structure. Thus the fact that the
Pharoahs, the ancient kings of Egypt, were buried in the Pyramids,
massive constructions which it must have taken a vast amount of
labour power to construct, tells us that we are dealing with a
society which was very hierarchical, in which monarchs were very
powerful. In no other way could we explain how a vast amount of
labour – most likely of slaves – was put to work building
these vast constructions for no other purpose than the burial of
kings. The investigator of organised crime has to work in a
similar way: we have to look at publically visible ‘bits and
pieces’ and try to infer the structure of the organisation that
lies behind it. Of course, and here critics argue that Cressey
fell into a trap he set himself, there may only be the bits and
pieces. The assumption that a complex organisation lies behind
them might be an unjustified dogmatic presupposition.
Participant observation
So
the conclusion is that the method by which the criminologist gets
information is by participant observation fieldwork. The tradition of
ethnography and participant observation in the social sciences
(crimininology, sociology, social anthropology) is very well
established and we cannot deal with it here. The box below gives some
references to the main literature and some web links
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H.
Becker (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of
Deviance New York: Free Press
N. Polsky (1969) Hustlers, beats and others. New
York: Anchor Books
F. Ianni (1972) A Family Business: kinship and social
control in organized crime. New York: Russell
Sage
L. Taylor (1984) In The Underworld. London:
Counterpoint
P. Adler (1985) Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography of
an Upper Level Drug Dealing and Smuggling Community,
New York; Colombia University Press
T. Williams (1990) The Cocaine Kids: the inside story
of a teenage drug ring. London: Bloomsbury
D. Hobbs (1995) Bad Business: Professional Crime in Modern
Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press
P. Bourgois (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El
Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
D. Zaitch (2002) Trafficking Cocaine: Colombian Drug Entrepreneurs in the
Netherlands. The Hague: Kluwer International
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A few brief remarks on some of the issues raised follow here; though
you can get much more from reading these books
Access
The
first problem is how to get access to the population you want to study.
You may go and live in the area, get a job with a local community
organisation. You’ll have to spend a considerable amount of time
initially ‘hanging around’ and getting yourself known as someone people
can talk to. But you’ll need an alibi. Who are you? That’s why a job in
a local community organisation is one form of useful cover. It says who
you are. You then need to get to know the significant ‘gate keepers’ in
the community, those who can lead you to others you may be more
interested in talking to. Local priests, social workers, and eventually
criminals. You will be very reliant on a ‘snowballing’ technique to get
access to people to talk to.
Trust
The
next thing you need to do is establish a relationship of trust with the
population you want to interview. Why on earth should they talk to you?
You need to overcome their initial suspicions: Who are you? Why are you
here? Who is paying for this so-called research you say you are doing?
Are you an undercover cop? Are you looking for illegal immigrants? One
of the points emphasised by those who have done this sort of research
is; do not ask for names of the people you interview. Make it clear
that you are not interested in names and not interested in any
information about particular crimes. That will help to establish that
you are not working for law enforcement. Do not use a tape recorder or
notebook unless you are really sure of your relationship to the people
being interviewed. Otherwise write it up afterwards. But you will have
to say what you are doing. It might be best to say you are writing a
study of the particular community you are working in. Thus Damien
Zaitch
The other side of trust of course is how
far you can trust what people are saying to you. Why should they talk
to you? Maybe they will be looking for an opportunity to brag about how
important they are.They may exaggerate their achievements (how much
money they make, the risks they take) Maybe they will tell you what
they think you want to hear. But maybe they will talk because they
actually value someone outside their own criminal environment to whom
they can say how scared and unhappy they are in a life of crime, how
they would like a steady, legal job and to get married and have a
family. But that they can’t see any way out of it right now. There will
be all sorts of motives at work. Finally, you may find yourself having
to do things for them to establish that you are trustworthy and will
give something back in return for the information they give you. Damien
Zaitch for example found himself helping with legal advice and language
issues, translating immigration documents etc. But, as he says, it is
vital not to get compromised, to get involved in anything which could
lead to criminal activity or which could lead to you holding
information which could lead to anyone getting arrested.
These are really just a few anecdotes. If you are interested in this
type of research then it has a long tradition and a vast literature.
Maybe you’ll end up doing some yourself.
That ends my lecture course on organised crime. Best of luck!
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