ABSTRACT
Crime is a social activity. This includes co-offending, where groups of offenders carry out specific criminal activities together, and the social interactions between criminals, through familial ties, friendship and shared locations, such as prisons. Identifying such relationships has been a major concern for police officers and crime analysts investigating areas ranging from highly organised enterprises, e.g. Triads, through to individual incidents such as armed robberies. Several methods have been used to aid such investigations by creating visual representations of relationships and connections. These representations are sociograms, one of a variety of measures used in a methodological approach called Social Network Analysis (SNA). SNA is used as part of a field in the social sciences termed Structural Analysis, which explicitly measures details of the structures of networks. A wide variety of research has been carried out that implicitly studies structure. Work on organised crime discusses concepts such as hierarchy and individual position. Descriptions of drug trafficking include differentiation of roles within the networks and how commodities are moved between different stages of the operations. There has been little research using SNA on criminal networks, in such areas as white-collar crime, juvenile delinquency and organised crime. A number of SNA measures have the potential to aid investigators – measures that identify how central individuals are and what subgroups are present, for example. These techniques need to be systematically tested to determine which ones will be of the most benefit in the analysis of criminal intelligence, with the aim of aiding in the development of operational and strategic action plans. A case study illustrates the application of SNA to a criminal network.
