Crime Disruption

Disruption is a tactic that effectively avoids the legal system. I have argued in this book that while there is a role for the criminal justice system in locking up prolific offenders, over-reliance on the system to resolve general crime issues is a recipe for failure (see the crime funnel). Disruption can be attractive, but there is now greater scrutiny of policing decisions than ever before. As has been pointed out, ‘who chooses the individual targets and the sorts of crimes that will be proactively investigated, and how do we judge (or even find out about) the propriety of who gets “disrupted” – are issues of great public importance. How one judges the value of “intelligence” that has no outlet in a criminal prosecution remains frequently mysterious’ . Because disruption can remove police activity from judicial oversight, there is always the potential for abuse. Organisations that actively engage in disruption should be especially careful to implement supervision and monitoring structures that enable crime disruption to take place while simultaneously being responsive to legal constraints.