2 - Routine Activities and Transnational Crime

Summary

OVERVIEW

All crime is local. That statement seems to be brusque and to conflict with the existence of transnational crime. But in this chapter I will defend the statement and show how emphasizing that crime is local helps us understand transnational crime to a greater extent.

Every criminal act can be disaggregated into a sequence of events. If this chain or sequence includes a border crossing, it is easily classified as transnational. But that classification does not tell the whole story. One or more elements in the sequence has to occur locally (see Levi & Reuter, 2006; van Duyne & Levi, 2005). Indeed, all crime requires a local focus of action at some point, perhaps at most points in its sequence. We expect that most transnational crimes include a chain of local actions that outnumber the border-crossing pieces of the chain. Indeed, local people on both sides of a border are usually involved in local aspects of transnational crimes.

This same argument applies to electronic crimes, which have local requirements in virtually all cases, such as unsupervised computers or local cooperation among offenders. Many criminal acts that eventually affect distant locations nonetheless occur initially in a much more limited setting, perhaps with several additional local requirements.

Transnational crimes are important, but they have not replaced or crowded out traditional crimes, such as direct physical theft and violence carried out in more or less the usual ways. That conclusion also misunderstands ways in which electronic crimes have very local requirements. Thus a cyber offender needs access to local computer equipment and local ways to hide identity or evade authority. Nor should we assume that the presence of offenders born abroad proves that crime is transnational, since many of these offenders do ordinary things, such as stealing, evading, confounding, invading, attacking, or confusing others.