Incentivising Professionals to Facilitate Serious and Organised Crimes: Motivations, Networks and Rationalisations

This integrates a criminological and social network analysis approach to empirically examine and build theory on how and why 'professional' actors (lawyers, accountants, notaries, consultants, company formation agents, etc.) are incentivised to facilitate serious and organised crimes within the UK.

What motivates these professional actors to become and remain involved in facilitating criminal activity? Profit, coercion, fear, ambition etc.
How are the networks of personal relations established and maintained over time? e.g. face to face, fraternal, online, anonymously, transactions through financial institutions)

How do professionals rationalise, neutralise or justify their behaviours and participation? e.g. common practice, no real/direct harm).

To address these questions, approximately 30 narrative interviews with offending professionals will be utilised, alongside an analysis of known cases (including shared learning from Police Scotland). The narrative approach will be used to elicit insights into the accounts of offenders regarding how they became involved as facilitators, what incentivised/motivated this involvement, and how they rationalised/neutralised their behaviours.

Further, an innovative ego-net social network analysis will be used to build an understanding of professional relations. The rationale underlying ego-net analysis is to explore the personal network of an individual (ego), with a focus on their immediate ties to other actors (alters). Interviewed 'offenders' can identify general characteristics of their contacts (what is their role, in which areas do they work), to create profiles of collaborators based on the cohesion or fragmentation of their facilitating network and on the reach of such networks across different domains (criminal, financial, institutional).

Police Scotland will play a role in identifying the relevant individuals, as well as other data in the public domain regarding cases which have been concluded by other relevant criminal justice and regulatory bodies, in addition to sharing their learning from cases they have investigated. The interview data will be written up as case studies, informed by illustrative timelines and network maps. It will also be imported into the UCINET (Borgatti et al 2002) and NETDRAW (Borgatti 2002) software for social network analysis.

Despite a relative consensus in the literature that professional actors with key skills facilitate organised crime, the motivations of professional actors to participate and the process in which they are identified, recruited and maintained remain under-explored (Lord et al., 2018). Alongside the development of theory, the findings of this research will provide stakeholders in law enforcement authorities with i) a comprehensive understanding of how and why professional actors are incentivised to facilitate organised crime activities, and ii) an evidence base for targeting points of vulnerability in those behaviours/actors/networks. The research will also engage with professional bodies who have a role in shaping the behaviours of key professions vulnerable to facilitation. Workshops will be arranged with relevant enforcement authorities to share findings and a policy 'tool-kit' developed to inform policymakers alongside academic publications.