Friends of the Forensic Sciences Club, this week we present the paper “Criminal investigation and Criminal intelligence: Example of Adaptation in the Prevention and Repression of Cybercrime” by Jerome, B. (2020), in which the author makes a revision about how investigation and criminal intelligence can assist in the prevention of cybercrime.
With the advancement of technologies in recent years we find ourselves in a context of digitization of criminal activities, which are increasingly perpetrated over the internet.
For this reason, the question of which are the most appropriate means to prevent and fight against this type of crime, which is practically new, is increasingly being raised.
Thanks to the development of the new criminology, a society that is based on risk prevention has emerged. This means that, over time, we have moved from focusing on criminal justice that comes after crime, to focusing on improving security, so that we can anticipate crime.
In other words, in this “risk society” we are increasingly focused on controlling our present and our future, and not on solving past situations.
The concepts of criminal investigation and intelligence take on special importance then.
Research, from the twentieth century, began a process of improving its structure. They opted for standardizing processes, systematizing them and increasing the efforts dedicated to crime.
With the evolution of the criminal investigation in these recent years, we can consider it practically an art, capable of individualizing the link between the criminal act and the perpetrator for judicial purposes.
Nevertheless, when it comes about defending the safety of citizens against cybercrime, investigation must continue to improve.
An example of this, is that the resolution rate for cybercrimes is quite low, especially if we talk about scams, which are more than the 70% of this type of offenses.
The novelty of this criminal dimension has, therefore, made traditional investigation a bit obsolete, because it is not able to face these challenges as expected.
Why? Because even today cybercrime is still tackled in a traditional way, without considering important social changes. Any complaint of this type of offense is handled in the same way as all those that don’t occur in online environments.
For instance, it is very difficult to establish connections between cases, because each event is addressed individually, with a single victim, often preventing the phenomenon from being considered in its true extent.
Police forces, realizing this, decided to put themselves at the service of intelligence and join their efforts.
Investigation understands criminal phenomena and criminal bands, especially through the study of cases, both current and past. Intelligence apprehends them globally, through broader data collection and more demanding information processing, among other solutions.
In this way, criminal intelligence would be part of a method to manage risks where the objective is reducing uncertainty in an environment where information is imperfect.
The approach that criminal intelligence would adopt, would be to explore a wide range of corrective measures, beyond criminal neutralization, which, although it is one of them, is not the only one and, furthermore, it is not always the most effective.
The union between these two disciplines was necessary to successfully prosecute cybercrime.
Why? Because the scope of its actors, its means of detection and investigation procedures draw on techniques that are different from those contemplated in the traditional penal system.
Thanks to his union, the repression of this criminal typology manages to adapt little by little to its context.
This occurs because criminal intelligence gathers the necessary elements to understand cybercrime. It provides promising solutions for handling this massive crime, which was not the case using only investigation.
A small progress achieved with the union of the two aforementioned disciplines that should be noted is that, in order to overcome the low level of reports of these crimes, law enforcement agencies consider that the victim’s complaint is no longer necessary to open an investigation.
One point the author of this paper wants to highlight is that public intervention is not enough, and the help of the private sector is required to successfully prevent cybercrime.
The paper concludes with the idea that, little by little, progress is happening in this complex area of online crime. And although there is still a long way to go, efforts made are beginning to bear fruit.
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