Tag Archive for: crime

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Geopolitics, influence and crime in the Pacific islands’

Originally published on 14 March 2024.

Getting caught up in geopolitical competition may seem uncomfortable enough for Pacific island countries. What’s making things worse is that outside powers’ struggle to influence them is weakening their resistance to organised crime emanating from China. 

And that comes on top of criminal activity that’s moved into Pacific islands from elsewhere, including Australia, Mexico, Malaysia and New Zealand. 

This situation must change if peace and stability are to be maintained and development goals achieved across the region. 

The good news is that, Papua New Guinea excluded, Pacific island countries have some of the lowest levels of criminality in the world. The bad news is that the data suggests the effect of organised crime is increasing across all three Pacific-island subregions—Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. 

The picture is worst in Melanesia and Polynesia, where resilience to crime has declined. In many cases, Pacific Island countries are insufficiently prepared to withstand growing criminal threats, exposing vulnerable populations to new risks. 

As China has gained influence in these countries, its criminals and criminal organisations have moved in alongside honest Chinese investors. Some of those criminals, while attending to their own business, are also doing the bidding of the Chinese government.  

If the criminal activity involves suborning local authorities—and it often will—then so much the better for Beijing, which will enjoy the officials’ new-found reliance on Chinese friends that it can influence. 

Democracies competing with China for influence, such as the US, Japan and Australia, are unwilling to lose the favour of those same officials. So, they refrain from pressuring them into tackling organised crime and corruption head on. The result is more crime and weaker policing. 

But more factors are at play here. Growing air travel and internet penetration have helped turn the islands into more accessible destinations and better-integrated points along global supply chains of licit and illicit commodities. 

When one starts mapping who is behind major organised criminality, the protagonists are almost always foreigners. The islands do have home-grown gangs but, when there is a lot of money to be made, there is usually the involvement of a Chinese triad, a Mexican cartel, a law-defying Malaysian logging company, or some similar criminal organisation. 

Groups that have entered the islands, such as Australia’s Rebels and New Zealand’s Head Hunters, both outlaw motorcycle gangs, or the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, are overtly criminal. Yet, some hybrid criminal actors are making their presence felt even more in some of the islands, and they are arguably even more pernicious and complex to eradicate. They tend to be foreign individuals who operate in both the licit and illicit economies, have become associated with local business elites, and enjoy political connections both at home and in the Pacific. 

As their operations have become bolder, as seen in Palau and Papua New Guinea, there are substantiated concerns that the perpetrators may be, or could become, tools of foreign political influence and interference. 

The poster boy of this cadre of actors is Wan Kuok Koi, aka Broken Tooth, a convicted Chinese gangster turned valued patriotic entrepreneur. Despite being sanctioned by the US, Wan has leveraged commercial deals linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and established cultural associations that have enabled him to co-opt local elites. He has also exploited links with the Chinese business diaspora to identify entry points for his criminal activities (such as establishing online scam centres) and has used extensive political connections to ensure impunity in his operations. 

Although they have a lower profile than Wan, many other foreign business actors are active across the region. They often gain high political access, preferential treatment and impunity through the diplomatic relations between their countries of origin (not just China) and the Pacific countries in which they operate. A further risk is that criminal revenues could also be channeled into electoral campaigns, undermining local democratic processes. 

These entrepreneurs have exploited favourable tax regimes, limited monitoring and enforcement capabilities and corrupted political connections. They often operate in extractive industries, real estate and financial services. 

As bribes pass from hand to hand, and as outside countries weigh their political considerations, Pacific citizens lose out. Some are vulnerable to labour and sexual exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous (and criminal) foreign businesses. Others see their lands, forests and waters degraded, or they are exposed to the introduction of new narcotics for which health services are unprepared.  

Fighting this transnational organised crime is critical to strengthening institutions in Pacific island countries and helping them build long-term sustainable prosperity. 

Outside countries should consider lateral approaches to crime fighting in the Pacific that may provide a framework for action that is more palatable to island-country governments than more sensitive, purely law-enforcement-driven strategies.  

Crime can be both a cause and an enabler of fragility and underdevelopment. With that in mind, the fight against crime and corruption could be framed as necessary primarily to address those two issues. They deeply impact Pacific populations, so it would be crucial to engage with affected communities along the way.

In the absence of such an approach, and with geopolitical and diplomatic considerations taking precedence, criminals will continue to exploit the limited attention that is paid to crime fighting and will profit as a result.

Our drug policies aren’t working. The evidence is in wastewater

Everyone knows illicit drug use in Australia is worsening, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we had precise numbers for gauging the scale of the problem? How useful it would be if we could measure consumption, perhaps even knowing just how much of each substance was being used in what locations and how patterns were changing.

In fact, we do have those figures, through analysis of wastewater; we’re just not paying enough attention to them. They show our current means of minimising harm from drug use isn’t working. We must look beyond treating it as a mainly law enforcement problem.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission released its 21st National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program report last month. It found that ‘more than 16.5 tonnes of methylamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and MDMA combined was consumed between August 2022 and August 2023 representing a 17 per cent increase in consumption of these drugs from the previous year’.

Reports from the commission’s National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program ought to be the most consequential inputs for developing illicit drug policy and law enforcement strategy in Australia. Seven years ago, on the eve of the release of the first report, one of Australia’s most senior law enforcement leaders at the time confided to this writer that the program would show, as it has shown, that our law enforcement strategy was having no impact on the availability of illicit drugs. It would show a failure of policy and strategy, that officer said.

Yet, the reports generally result in several print media reports and quickly fade from public and policymaking attention.

The program is a sophisticated initiative focused on gathering intelligence about drug consumption patterns across Australia. It involves collecting and analysing sewage samples from various places, including cities and regional areas, to detect and monitor the presence of illicit drugs and pharmaceuticals in wastewater. By examining the levels of substances such as methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA, and opioids, it offers valuable insights into drug use trends, geographical distribution and changes in consumption patterns.

It uses advanced analytical techniques to quantify the concentration of targeted substances. By monitoring drug use at a population level it should help identify emerging drug threats, assess the effectiveness of existing interventions and guide efficient allocation of resources to address public health concerns related to substance abuse.

The latest report reveals several trends in drug consumption. One is continued high use of methamphetamine in many urban and regional areas, indicating ongoing challenges in reducing its availability. Additionally, the program has detected fluctuations in consumption of other drugs, such as cocaine, MDMA, and prescription opioids. Drug use patterns are dynamic.

The findings underscore the importance of targeted interventions and evidence-based strategies to address substance abuse, especially the need for a comprehensive approach that combines law enforcement efforts with public health initiatives.

The program’s findings are not mere statistics; they are revelations that should reverberate through policymaking and public-health administration. Outstanding performance by our law enforcement and border officers, with their record levels of drug seizures and arrests, is clearly having negligible effect on drug availability, use or price.

Some argue that, if not for these efforts, the problem would be worse. It’s a hollow argument. Our enforcement strategy aims not to prevent things from worsening but to improve them. In short, the Wastewater Monitoring Program provides seven years of evidence of the need for a paradigm shift in our approach to illicit drugs.

The data should empower policymakers to sculpt interventions that transcend rhetoric, go beyond traditional law enforcement and embrace a comprehensive strategy where public health, harm reduction and treatment intertwine.

Alternatives to a strictly law enforcement approach to illicit drugs focus on public health, harm reduction and treatment strategies. Drug possession for personal use should be treated as a civil offence or a minor infraction rather than a crime. This approach aims to reduce the negative consequences of drug use, such as incarceration and stigma, while prioritising public health interventions. It was introduced in Canberra in 2024 and has not resulted in an influx of drug tourists or a marked increase in organised crime.

Harm reduction programs, such as needle exchanges, safe injecting rooms, and pill testing, are crucial. These initiatives improve the wellbeing of drug users and reduce the spread of infectious diseases without necessarily focusing on drug prohibition.

Investing in accessible and effective drug treatment and rehabilitation programs is also necessary. These efforts should include counselling, detoxification services, medication-assisted treatment (such as methadone or buprenorphine for opioid use disorder) and mental health support. Emphasising treatment over punishment can help individuals overcome addiction and reintegrate into society.

Prevention efforts should continue to aim at reducing drug-use initiation and promoting healthy behaviour. This includes education campaigns in schools and communities, raising awareness about the risks of drug use and focusing on harm.

These alternatives often complement each other, forming a comprehensive approach that acknowledges the complexity of drug use and addiction while prioritising public health and harm reduction.

Law enforcement still has a place in our national illicit drug strategy. It must continue to focus on reducing the availability of illicit drugs and disrupting organised crime. Its success here should not be assessed based on arrests and seizures but by the Wastewater Monitoring Program’s evidence base.

The Australian government’s approach to illicit drugs is shaped by a complex interplay of factors, including political dynamics, international obligations, evidence-based practices, resource considerations and public perceptions. Any changes to drug strategies are typically considered within this broader context to ensure a comprehensive and sustainable approach to addressing drug-related challenges. However, we must recognize what the evidence shows.

Foreign spies and gangsters: why Australia needs a national security strategy

In June, the Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group—comprising the heads of national police for Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the UK and the US—revealed that foreign governments were infiltrating organised crime groups to launder money and sell drugs in Australia.

The announcement came exactly one year after the Australian Federal Police, working in conjunction with the FBI, New Zealand Police and Europol, announced the culmination of Trojan Shield, a massive investigation using a compromised messaging app known as AN0M. The decrypted messages harvested from AN0M showed a complex web of criminal offending that included unnamed foreign nationals and government officials.

Yet Australia’s extensive array of foreign interference and espionage laws—which were bolstered in June 2018 against the backdrop of national elections—appear relatively powerless to confront cooperation between overseas governments and organised crime figures.

While the national security risks from foreign spies and agents are easy to see, it can be more difficult to make the connection between organised crime and national security. Law enforcement seems, up until the success of Trojan Shield, to have largely sought to apply traditional policing methods to thwart illicit drug suppliers and money launderers. Many of these methods—search warrants, criminal informers, surveillance—haven’t changed for decades.

But the voices of those calling out the dangers to Australia’s national security posed by organised crime have been getting louder over the past several years. In 2015, ASPI highlighted a lack of consistency across law enforcement’s efforts to disrupt organised crime rather than simply prosecute key figures. In 2017, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission observed a spike in organised crime syndicates’ involvement in visa and migration fraud, undermining Australia’s strong border-protection policies. And just last year, the National Security College at the Australian National University described organised crime as ‘a national security threat more urgent and severe than terrorism’.

Generally, the parliament’s response to threats to Australia’s national interests has been to pass new laws or increase penalties. Since 2001, Australia has enacted more than 80 pieces of legislation designed to strengthen its national security framework. These laws have given our intelligence agencies unprecedented powers to hack into computers, decrypt messages, covertly search properties and seize assets suspected of being the proceeds of crime. At the same time, national security offences have been broadened so much that they can risk the valuable work being undertaken by university researchers and journalists.

But the results don’t seem to be matching the effort put into the legislative framework. The foreign interference laws that were passed so speedily in 2018 didn’t result in a single prosecution until November 2020, and only a handful of cases have been conducted since. Though public reporting is notoriously patchy in revealing all instances of criminal prosecutions as they head through the court system, and foreign interference investigations are time and resource intensive, it seems unlikely that further laws will deter foreign adversaries’ engagement with organised crime.

Indeed, Australian law already criminalises this type of behaviour. A person who helps or assists in committing any offence can be charged just like the person who goes through with it. So, agents acting on behalf of foreign governments can be prosecuted just as easily as other criminals under Australia’s existing legislation.

Obviously, no government should ignore the dangers that organised criminals and agents of foreign governments pose to our nation’s interests—whether economic, social, political or cultural. But perhaps the time has come for a different approach by Australia’s lawmakers.

Rather than more laws (which don’t seem to be working), what’s needed is clearer and more comprehensive integration and fusion of the capabilities of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They need to be better able to share information and expertise, collaborate on cases and achieve the same levels of disruption for organised crime as they do for foreign agents in Australia. Most importantly, they need to coordinate in a way that enhances—not undermines—the rule of law in Australia and ensures that any evidence used in criminal cases is gathered lawfully.

Perhaps the time as come to revive the concept of a national security strategy. In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched a national security statement, promising to update it every year as the strategic environment of Australia changed. But that didn’t happen. Then the Julia Gillard’s government in 2013 attempted to introduce a national security strategy, titled ‘Strong and secure’. That document never reached the parliament.

Of all the Five Eyes nations, Australia is the only one without a publicly articulated national security strategy. Such a strategy should define what our national interests are and what threats we consider to be the greatest dangers to those interests. It should also outline how—albeit at a high level—our national security agencies, police and even military forces intend to respond to each of those threats.

The development of a national security strategy should also be a chance for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to check in with the broader public about the needs of Australians for a safe and secure country. In drafting its 2008 strategy, the government sought the views of the public in shaping what was (and what was not) in the UK’s national interests.

Three years ago, counterterrorism researchers Nicola McGarrity and Jessie Blackbourn wrote that the most important thing Australia had learned since 9/11 was that ‘we must think creatively about how to combat the threat of terrorism’. Right now, Australia could be making the same mistakes about organised crime. Hopefully, the new government will have the foresight to take action now and avoid repeating history.

The US front in the global war on women

The political ructions unleashed in the United States by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing a federal right to abortion, have been immediate and furious. But less attention has been paid to the international backdrop against which the court’s decision landed. Evidence from around the world points to an increasingly wide-ranging attack on women’s liberty, including in proud democracies.

‘Just don’t have sex if you don’t want a baby’, said an impassioned young woman outside the US Supreme Court in June 2022. If only all women had that choice. And if only anti-abortion activists would commit to making it so. In fact, a sexual assault occurs every 68 seconds, on average, in the US. One of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. From 2009–13, US child protective services agencies substantiated or found strong evidence to indicate that 63,000 children per year were victims of sexual abuse.

In the United Kingdom, rape offences are at their highest recorded annual level to date, with police in England and Wales recording 67,125 cases in 2021. Yet there were only 1,557 prosecutions in 2021, down from 2,102 in 2020. Over the past four years, rape prosecutions in England and Wales have fallen by 70%. Simply put, a woman’s right not to be raped is not being upheld.

Similarly, the World Health Organization estimates that nearly a third of women worldwide have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate-partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. In many countries, Covid-19-pandemic-related lockdown restrictions both increased the caseload and reduced the capacity of systems to manage it.

But the pandemic is not the only factor behind the rise in violence against women. In Russia, domestic violence has increased since January 2017, when lawmakers provoked international disgust by decriminalising it. Predictably, the higher incidence has been accompanied by a sharp decline in reporting and a lack of willingness by police to investigate cases.

And Russia is not alone. In England and Wales, almost half of adult female homicide victims in the year ending in March 2021 were killed in a domestic homicide, and a staggering 1.6 million women reported domestic abuse. But while the number of recorded domestic abuse-related crimes in England and Wales rose to 845,734 in this period, the number of referrals from the police to the Crown Prosecution Service fell to 77,812, from 79,965 in the year ending in March 2020. And for the third successive year, the CPS charging rate for domestic abuse-related crimes in England and Wales decreased, to 70%, from 76% in the year ending in March 2018.

The evidence demonstrates that in most countries a violent partner who threatens rape and impregnation is unlikely to face consequences. In the US, the Supreme Court has now hugely amplified the coercive power of this threat. In the chilling words of the dissenting justices, ‘from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.’

What, then, is liberty for women in America and other countries today? Are we to accept that criminal justice systems cannot keep up when women are attacked, abused and raped? Are we to accept that in US states that have already outlawed abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest, ‘a woman will have to bear her rapist’s child or a young girl her father’s—no matter if doing so will destroy her life’?

Violence against women is preventable. Comprehensive legislation is fundamental, and the number of countries adopting it has been growing. But effective enforcement is no less vital, including support for women to come forward and adequate funding, monitoring and cooperation among police, prosecutors and courts in bringing perpetrators to justice.

The WHO describes a further set of measures with the acronym RESPECT: relationship skills strengthening; empowerment of women; services ensured; poverty reduced; enabling environments (schools, workplaces, public spaces) created; child and adolescent abuse prevented; and transformed attitudes, beliefs and norms.

The international evidence highlights specific measures such as psychosocial support, economic- and social-empowerment programs, cash transfers and school programs that enhance safety, reduce or eliminate harsh punishment, challenge gender stereotypes and promote relationships based on equality and consent. These are some of the building blocks for female liberty.

The US Supreme Court has gone in the opposite direction. Instead of looking ahead to a world where the rights of women and children are better protected, the justices who struck down Roe v. Wade look back to ‘history and tradition’ to guide their views about the meaning of ‘ordered liberty’. They note that ‘until the latter part of the twentieth century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion… Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State.’

But the justices ignore that during much of that history, liberty was almost exclusively the prerogative of adult (white) males. Until 1920, women in the US could not vote, and for long after, they were unable to divorce or obtain credit in their own names. In many states, marriage to the victim was recognised as a legitimate defence against a rape charge (as late as 1979 in New Jersey, for example). Are historical traditions really the best guide to interpreting what liberty is to be accorded to whom?

With the right to vote, women’s participation in representative politics has gradually increased. But this, too, is now under attack. Women are being hounded out of public life by intense, demeaning, sexualised online harassment. In Japan, a pattern of sexist attacks on Twitter, directed against female politicians, has been documented.

Similarly, a study in Sweden shows that whereas male politicians are primarily targeted in terms of their official roles, female MPs are subjected to degrading comments that explicitly target them as women, leading them to self-censor more than their male colleagues. The same disparity has been found in Canada. In the UK, female politicians from left to right have spoken out about the problem.

It is time for all politicians to support not just robust legislation but also the funding and institutions needed to uphold women’s liberty and safety, whether at home, in politics or at their doctor.

AI and policing: what a Queensland case study tells us

Policing agencies consider artificial intelligence a force multiplier because it can rapidly process more data than human brains and yield insights to help solve complex analytical problems.

Our limited understanding of how AI algorithms make decisions and produce their insights, however, presents a significant challenge to ethically and safely implementing AI policing solutions. The use of AI by Queensland police provides a valuable opportunity to study how we can mitigate the possible negative, ethical and operational effects of this problem.

The state is trialling AI as a risk-assessment tool to predict and prevent crime, in this case domestic violence. It screens data from police records to identify ‘high risk of high harm’ repeat offenders. Police then routinely pre-emptively ‘knock on doors’ to deter escalation to violence and, theoretically, lessen the likelihood of perpetrators reoffending.

Police say perpetrators have proved more likely to recognise their intervention outside a ‘point of crisis’ (domestic violence incident) and they believe this provides a ‘turning point opportunity’ for habitual offenders to deviate from a trajectory of repeated offending.

However, door-knocking for deterrence can have serious negative impacts, including the possibility of triggering further conflict within families experiencing repeated violence. This possible antagonising effect on offenders in a ‘precrime’ strategy would have to be mitigated for this process to be ethical according to the federal framework, and for it to be effective in reducing domestic violence.

I raised this issue with the Queensland Police Service. They said the trial had demonstrably not driven further violence, and cited a 56% reduction in incidents in one cohort of high-risk, high-harm offenders with a possible victim cohort of 1,156 people.

These statistics are compelling evidence that the program could reduce offending by such perpetrators. It could also reduce deaths. The police say that 30% of domestic violence homicides in the state are carried out by offenders already known to them for domestic violence, and known offenders are significantly more likely to suicide.

The Queensland Police Service’s aim is to prevent domestic violence, disrupt recidivist behaviour and ‘arrest no one’.

How did the police deal with the limitations and potential pitfalls of AI?

First, the police own the AI and developed it in house, substantially increasing its transparency.

The barrier of commercial interests that prevent a company from sharing the details of product development was removed, as in the case of AI used to make parole decisions by some US courts. Data scientists were employed to work closely with officers at all stages of the AI’s development and deployment.

Owning the supply chain gives police as comprehensive an understanding as possible, given the technical limitations, of the processes by which the AI is developed, trained and then deployed and monitored by in-house data scientists. This includes understanding what human biases may have been coded into the AI, what mitigation strategies have been used, what AI biases might develop through its operation on live datasets, and what should be guarded against via monitoring once the AI is deployed into live datasets.

Police ownership also seems to have provided an opportunity for authentic policing knowledge and judgement to be included at the design stage, rather than as a retrofit after the proprietary development of the product.

Critically, police could ensure the AI was trained on state police data. That meant that, while it’s not possible to avoid coding human bias into AI, they could be certain that the bias was from their own historical data and therefore known and understood. Those training datasets serve as a historical resource from which police data scientists can glean information on the historical human bias of the police force and try to code safeguards against it into the AI.

Knowledge of AI decisions is similarly increased by the AI being owned and developed in house, because the data scientists using and monitoring it and the police officers employing have all the same information about it as those who developed and trained it.

To be eligible for assessment by AI, subjects must be already considered high risk and high harm through their previous interactions with police and have at least three domestic violence orders against them. This helps police know which of all the homes experiencing repeated family violence they should door-knock to deter further violence. Police don’t have the resources to door-knock all homes with a record of domestic violence.

It’s likely that using AI for high-risk criminal justice decisions will never be a good idea if we’re striving for safe, fair, ethical and reliable AI use. But it can provide valuable insights and context to inform policing decisions.

Identifying at-risk victims is not the focus, despite the overall goal being to prevent or reduce the rate and severity of violence endured by victims of habitual offenders.

So, the potential harm of over-policing subjects is arguably neutralised by the fact that police have already been interacting with them due to their repeated offending. This is not a risk-assessment of a general cross-section of a community, or even a cohort with a single record of violence.

But if AI decision-making were used in a higher-risk policing scenario, who would be accountable for incorrect decisions: police, computer scientists, policymakers or even the AI?

The eligibility criteria provide a key safeguard for limitations on transparency and explainability because if someone is incorrectly flagged for a door-knock, they are still a known, repeat perpetrator. If we accept the ethical and practical legitimacy (in terms of likelihood to achieve outcomes of harm reduction) of police pre-emptively door-knocking known offenders at all, then it can’t be argued that incorrectly door-knocking someone at a slightly lower but still significant risk of triggering violence counts as over-policing or violating their right to privacy and equality. A net benefit logic applies.

Problems remain, though. Significant technological development is required to design comprehensively transparent and explainable AI.

Computer scientists tell us that it remains incredibly difficult, if it proves possible at all, to comprehensively understand how AI make decisions within live datasets as they develop more and more correlations that aren’t visible to monitors, as in overfitting. We need to keep trying, and to hold AI to equal, or higher, ethical standards than human decision-making.

As for the net benefit argument, using AI as a solution could obfuscate both the root causes of a problem and the possible alternative, non-technical solutions. Can we, for example, better support victims in the family court to prevent them living in a perpetually violent home?

AI solutions are here to stay. Appropriate regulation in law enforcement scenarios is imperative to mitigate their significant potential impacts on justice outcomes and civil liberties. If Australia wants to ensure AI is safe, secure and reliable, we need an ethical framework that is compulsory and legally enforceable, not voluntary and aspirational.

Australia needs a better strategy for fighting organised crime

In 2017, the Australian Institute of Criminology estimated that the cost of serious and organised crime to Australia in 2016–17 was around $47.4 billion. A more recent estimate isn’t available, but all things being equal, the figure for 2020–21 is likely to be significantly higher; it seems it never goes down. Despite a raft of new legislation, big spending and large, high-profile seizures by Australian law enforcement, including Operation Ironside earlier this year, policy success has been elusive.

Two factors likely undermine policy efforts here. First, the public seems to be unable to connect with the scale and scope of the serious and organised crime threat. Second, policymaking continues to be heavily slanted towards law enforcement rather than risk mitigation. So, while we disrupt the threats from criminal groups, we never mitigate the likelihood or consequences of serious and organised crime.

At the state and territory level, law enforcement and community safety are big-ticket political issues. Spates of violent crime, drug-related offences and theft resonate with the community, and the media demand immediate police responses.

At the federal level, it’s easy to assume that $47.4 billion in costs would be equally motivating. It’s not. Of course, especially egregious criminal offences, like child exploitation, can have a profound impact on the victims and their families. Yet, the combined effect of popular culture’s romanticisation of the problem, through programs like The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy, and the absence of a clear, personal cause-and-effect relationship mean that many Australians can’t see how serious and organised crime touches their lives. This apparent indifference needs to change.

Getting policy settings right is no easier than getting the public behind them.

In 2018, in response to the rising cost of serious and organised crime, the government announced plans to leverage the benefits of the newly formed Home Affairs portfolio to establish a Commonwealth transnational, serious and organised crime coordinator. The office was tasked with better integrating and unifying the country’s various serious and organised crime enforcement efforts.

The approach was a carbon copy of the highly successful implementation of the Commonwealth counterterrorism coordinator. That arrangement’s success across federal, state and territory jurisdictions didn’t come from any authoritative power. It succeeded because governments and the general public understood the significance of the threat of terrorism. The Commonwealth organised crime coordinator hasn’t had those advantages.

In December 2018, the government released its inaugural National strategy to fight transnational, serious and organised crime.

The document provides a four-pillar approach to preventing, disrupting and protecting Australia against serious and organised crime. The first pillar focuses on ‘integrating’ Australia’s available tools to disrupt criminal business models. The second pillar is concerned with building strong domestic and international ‘partnerships’. The third seeks to strengthen national law enforcement ‘capability’. The fourth is a commitment to the strategy’s ‘evolution’ through agility.

The strategy’s authors focused on unifying existing efforts and increasing the responsiveness of law enforcement agencies. The problem is that those agencies’ key performance indicators clearly illustrate that they’re already providing some pretty impressive results.

In 2018, the Australian Transnational, Serious and Organised Crime Committee was established to drive the implementation and monitoring of the national strategy. Membership of the committee comprises a senior official (deputy secretary equivalent) from each Australian policing and justice agency; New Zealand Police; the New Zealand Ministry of Justice; the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre; the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission; the Office of National Intelligence; the Australian Border Force; and the Department of Home Affairs.

In short, the implementation of the strategy has been concerned with disrupting organised crime by increasing enforcement efforts. There can be no doubt that law enforcement’s operational successes within and outside of Australia have been breathtaking, and we ought to be impressed by the return on investment that has provided. We should also acknowledge that the cross-jurisdictional committee and the national strategy have enhanced cooperation and collaborative capability development. However, all of this has come at the cost of whole-of-government disruption policy.

Over the past three years, organised crime policy focused on disrupting and target-hardening has withered at the vine. The Commonwealth coordinator position has been weakened, with responsibility moving from a deputy secretary to a first assistant secretary and now an assistant secretary in Home Affairs.

The problem here is that the strategy’s intent is not to increase the return on investment from law enforcement or to arrest more criminals. The purpose is to ‘protect Australia, its people, and its interests from the harms of transnational, serious and organised crime’. So, if the cost of serious and organised crime increases, like it has with illicit drug consumption, has the strategy failed? In short, the answer must be yes, but that isn’t a reflection on law enforcement. Neither should this be an acceptance of the assumption that the problem would be even worse without law enforcement.

This illustrates that there needs to be a broader focus on our efforts to disrupt organised crime. These efforts need to decrease the likelihood and consequences of serious and organised crime, as opposed to trying to arrest offenders. Unfortunately, our current strategy doesn’t work towards this goal.

In response, the minister for home affairs should consider establishing an independent organised crime advisory committee. The committee, chaired by the department’s secretary, should have a broad membership with representatives from academia, marketing, medicine, education and industry. Its key focus should be on developing innovative non-enforcement ideas for disrupting organised crime and reducing our vulnerability to it. This is not an alternative to the law enforcement effort, but an additional mechanism.

If we don’t find a new approach to dealing with serious and organised crime, we’ll continue to see more drugs seized, more cash and assets restrained and more people in prison. At the same time, the economic and social costs of serious and organised crime will keep rising.

Changing people’s behaviour can stop wildlife trade and help prevent pandemics

Shutting down wet markets trading wildlife for food and traditional medicine is only part of the challenge in stopping future viruses from turning into pandemics like Covid-19. The bigger challenge is ending the demand for wild animals in the first place. Getting the message right is critical, and bodies such as the World Health Organization are forming advisory teams of behavioural psychologists to help.

Even so, international non-government organisations like the WWF believe the WHO is getting the message completely wrong on shutting wet markets, making it harder for health experts to cut through on the dangers of eating wild animals. The WHO’s position effectively condones the continuing trade in wildlife; earlier this year it said that while governments should ‘enforce bans on the sale of wildlife’, wet markets have an ‘important role in some societies’. In a recent email, the WHO clarified that it endorses banning the trade in live wild animals only, not the sale of dead wildlife in markets for food or traditional medicine.

Behavioural change experts at the US Wildlife Conservation Society agree that this kind of mixed messaging makes it difficult to convince people to take wild animals off the menu. They say change starts only when people are given one clear message.

Pangolins remain a focus for wildlife campaigners in the quest to control the Covid-19 pandemic. An animal like the pangolin could have been a vector in the transmission of the novel coronavirus from bats to humans and pangolins are a favourite on the black market. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says pangolins, both dead and alive, are the most trafficked animal in the world. They are bought for food and their scales are used in traditional medicine, mainly in Africa and Asia.

According to UNODC research released this year, Chinese demand for pangolins continues. Half of the people it surveyed in China had bought wild animals for food or as traditional medicine products and said they would continue to do so.

Environmental destruction can lead to disease outbreaks, so conservation groups are tackling the psychology behind the desire to consume wildlife in the first place, especially its association with ideas of luxury, status and medical efficacy.

Conservation groups are drawing inspiration from the behavioural insights generated by successful public health campaigns on HIV and AIDS in Asia and global anti-smoking initiatives.

Campaigns from the 1980s to late 1990s proved that health education through religious institutions like monasteries in Thailand can change behaviour and attitudes in young people. Health NGOs worked with religious leaders to educate young boys about HIV transmission and safety, tackling misinformation about the disease. They found that clear, scientifically backed information presented by respected religious leaders and teachers in the local language was successful in changing false beliefs about HIV and AIDS.

However, according to the wildlife NGO Traffic, while education and facts can work with young people, beliefs and social pressure are more important for adults. To change adult behaviour, the NGO focuses on those who are sitting on the fence, the ‘doubters’. Members of this group may be worried about their health but may also hold on to some traditional beliefs about the benefits of consuming traditional medicine, for example. Contradictory beliefs can be an important lever for behavioural change—the trick here is to mobilise fear to tip the balance.

Another example is the success of the anti-tobacco campaigns that aim to overwhelm the positive associations of smoking with graphic images of its health implications. Fear about one’s own health combined with strong images of how repulsive an activity is can be the starting point for changing behaviour.

Reducing demand for wildlife by using a concerted and ongoing campaign to frighten people about the dangers not just to health, but to livelihood from trading wild animals is also having an impact. Maria Diekmann, the founder of the Rare and Endangered Species Trust in Namibia, has recently seen the benefits of the Namibian government’s efforts to stop poaching of pangolins by giving magistrates more power to increase fines and jail traffickers. Promisingly, these new laws seem to be deterring corrupt tour operators and others from helping local mafias find pangolins to sell into the Asian market.

On the demand side of this trade, Diekmann believes Chinese celebrities have been instrumental in making the wildlife trade unpalatable. Celebrities influence the middle classes and often have more clout than scientists when it comes to explaining the facts about the wildlife trade. For example, the Chinese public had very little awareness that pangolins were being killed for the medicinal use of their scales. But once Chinese actress Angela Wing started supporting the conservation of pangolins (and Diekmann’s work), this changed.

Wing reached more than 50 million people on the issue in only one week through her social media channels—the kind of reach most NGOs or governments can only dream of.

The WWF agrees that social media can help stop people from buying wildlife products. In one recent example, the WWF sent messages to visitors arriving in Thailand and Vietnam during Lunar New Year exhorting them not to buy ivory products. The WWF also uses ambassadors and celebrities to endorse their campaigns with the aim of framing animal products as unfashionable and dated.

However, without the coordinated support of organisations like the WHO, reducing demand for wild animals and wildlife products remains a significant challenge for environmental groups. Fortunately, the examples mentioned above show that action from local governments and community-focused NGOs, plus a good dose of celebrity support, can make an impact.

Trump administration attack on International Criminal Court dangerous and counterproductive

In March 2020, the International Criminal Court authorised the independent Office of the Prosecutor to investigate allegations that war crimes were committed by some of those fighting in Afghanistan since May 2003.

The ICC was established in 2002 by the Rome Statute, with the goal of ending impunity for perpetrators of the most severe atrocities under international law: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. This is an enormous task, but it’s key to facilitating lasting peace and equality in a post-conflict society and in the broader international order.

The ICC has had a rocky history, with arguably as many setbacks as successes. The latest challenge is the signing of an executive order on 11 June by US President Donald Trump authorising sanctions against employees of the ICC in retaliation for its investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by US military and intelligence personnel.

The US government can now freeze the assets of and ban travel by ICC staff and their families, or anyone else it believes has supported the court’s investigation. In announcing these sanctions, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the ICC as corrupt and labelled it a ‘kangaroo court’ that has no jurisdiction over US personnel.

Pompeo’s claim that the ICC’s jurisdiction doesn’t extend to the actions of US personnel in Afghanistan is incorrect. While it is true the US has never been a signatory to the Rome Statute, Afghanistan deposited its instrument of accession in February 2003. Under paragraph 12(2)(a) of the statute, the ICC has jurisdiction over atrocities committed in state parties, which means it can investigate alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, whether the US recognises its jurisdiction or not.

The Trump administration’s authorisation of sanctions, as well as its claims of corruption within the ICC, constitute a political attack on the court. The US says that the aim of the sanctions is to ensure it retains the right to put its own soldiers on trial; however, the absence of any reliance on the principle of complementarity, which would achieve just that, stands out.

This principle, enshrined in Article 17 of the statute, gives primacy to domestic prosecutions. A case is admissible before the ICC only if a state proves ‘unwilling or unable’ to genuinely investigate and prosecute the alleged offences committed by its citizens. US Secretary of Defence Mark Esper spoke of the ‘proven record’ of the US in ‘investigating and prosecuting alleged abuse of detainees’ and other forms of misconduct.

One explanation for the administration’s lack of reliance on the principle of complementarity may be that the US’s ‘proven record’ of investigations is not as extensive as it claims. Human Rights Watch found that while some investigations were conducted into alleged abuses by US personnel in Afghanistan, they were severely limited in scope. Only 101 cases were investigated, and no charges were brought. Human Rights Watch found no evidence that victims were interviewed. And the investigations focused on alleged abuses that went beyond authorised interrogation methods, ignoring the fact that much of what was authorised also constituted torture under both international and US law.

So, rather than risk the principle of complementarity not holding up in the US’s favour, the Trump administration has launched a political offensive against the ICC.

In response, the ICC issued a statement condemning the US’s actions as an ‘unprecedented’ attack on the court and interference with the rule of law. The Trump administration’s stance is highly problematic, but it is unfortunately not unique.

The ICC has long faced political retaliation for the investigations conducted by the Office of the Prosecutor, including Russia’s withdrawal of its signature from the Rome Statute in 2016, the near mass withdrawal of African states in 2017, and the threatened arrest of the ICC prosecutor by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines in 2018. Of great concern is that, until now, these were primarily the actions of autocratic leaders, driven by self-interest, to avoid the scrutiny of an independent judicial process. The US, which has long been the champion of the international liberal democratic order, is exhibiting increasingly illiberal and autocratic characteristics.

On 11 June, Pompeo warned the allies that fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, ‘Your people could be next.’ For Australia, this is an unlikely prospect, given that, as long ago as May 2016, the defence force launched an investigation into allegations and rumours that special forces troops had killed unarmed Afghan men and children.

That investigation, led by former New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Paul Brereton, is expected to be concluded soon. After interviewing many Australian special forces veterans, Brereton, and Australian Federal Police officers, travelled to Afghanistan last year to interview witnesses there. Now, Australia’s Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions is preparing to prosecute war crimes.

Key US allies, including Australia, the UK and Canada (alongside 64 other states), have signed a joint statement that’s a clear declaration of support for the ICC. The signatories called on all states to cooperate with the court on the fight against impunity and reaffirmed their commitment to an international rules-based order from which everyone benefits, irrespective of what side they were on in a conflict.

I can see clearly now! Tech innovation in law enforcement

On 23 June 1972, soul singer Johnny Nash released his most popular song: ‘I can see clearly now’. His upbeat classic wasn’t a Pollyanna vision of life, but an argument for changing your perspective by clearing away, or pushing through, the issues that prevent you from seeing clearly. Today, the song is particularly pertinent to technological innovation in law enforcement. Very simply, technology won’t allow us to ‘see all obstacles in our way’; what we need is a clearer perspective of our new operating context.

In response to this challenge, ASPI has released its latest Special Report, I can see clearly now! Technological innovation in Australian law enforcement: A case study of anti-money laundering.

The Australian government’s technology monopolies ended long ago. Technological developments, especially disruptive ones, have been driven primarily by private corporations for at least the past 10 years. Meanwhile, legislative responses to those changes, be they disruptive or otherwise, have been increasingly delayed. The current state of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 is a case in point.

Acceleration in the development and use of technology has been matched by changes in the capability of those who would do us harm. In the face of rapid social change, governments have lost more than a technological edge, as the basic considerations of sovereignty and geographical jurisdictions are being challenged.

Law enforcement agencies’ traditional business models for dealing with organised crime are under significant pressure from criminal syndicates that can operate more agile decision-making cycles and exploit seams between jurisdictions and in agencies’ capabilities.

In this context, Australian law enforcement faces an increasing number of challenges from emergent technologies. A key policy challenge underpinning these issues relates to the limited capacity of agencies to introduce innovative strategies in response to disruptive technology. Another is how to make cross-jurisdictional cooperation simpler and easier.

The complexity of responding to the technological innovation challenge isn’t lost on law enforcement or the government. In 2018, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement commenced an inquiry into the impact of new and emerging information and communications technology.

Our research explores technological innovation in law enforcement through a case study of anti-money laundering (AML) provisions. One of the most effective strategies available to law enforcement is the use of AML provisions to disrupt access to funds by non-state actors such as organised crime and terrorist groups.

The report analyses the factors that support or restrict technological innovation in federal law enforcement’s AML efforts. While the research focused on new technologies involving AML, it has broader applications to technological innovation in law enforcement.

We argue that the current AML innovation ecosystem needs to be integrated into a holistic whole-of-government law enforcement innovation program. For this to be successful, strategies to address the dual challenge of disruptive technology and the integration of existing pockets of AML excellence will need to be developed. The initial steps for responding to this challenge should include an analysis of the central assumptions that underpin innovation, policymaking, strategy and finance in this space.

Innovators and strategists alike need to be mindful that predictive analytics aren’t a panacea for foreseeing the future and random events. It’s unlikely that such analytics will foresee inflection points beyond the data used to construct models.

Future technological innovation will largely be undertaken by industry, not government, although governments can drive innovation by investing in science and technology and by setting challenges for industry. Our research revealed the private sector’s perspective is that this reality is having lasting impacts on public sector technological innovation, and so strategic partnerships with businesses need to become the norm.

The evidence seems clear that our way of life will be revolutionised by frequent technological disruptions. While those disruptions will appear outside of conventional thinking, they’ll then be rapidly accepted and normalised. Engaging with such new thinking, new opportunities, new risks and new threats requires cultures of innovation in enforcement and regulatory agencies.

Our research found little evidence that the organisational frameworks for enterprise or portfolio technological innovation in federal law enforcement agencies are fully developed. Despite the existence of various pockets of innovation excellence, there are indicators of cognitive bias in some of the thinking on technological innovation. In many cases, there was a symmetry in agency responses that could also be evidence of the need for greater variation in policy perspectives and advice.

Overall, this research revealed that the focus of technological innovation in AML is often on specific platforms, tools and capabilities at the expense of more strategic thinking.

Innovation in AML is often more akin to a cottage industry in which integration isn’t widely considered. It means technologies aren’t consistently well integrated into organisational strategies, across portfolios, or across the whole of government.

However, by no means does the report argue that technological innovation isn’t occurring, or that agencies don’t have the right people. Rather, the law enforcement sector has the time and capability for disruption of its own. The key to this disruption won’t be ‘innovation theatre’, but far more tangible changes and a commitment to realising those changes.

Opportunities abound: optimising our criminal intelligence system overseas

Image courtesy of Flickr user thierry ehrmann

Obtaining criminal intelligence (CrimInt) from overseas sources, and then disseminating selected assessments, are increasingly important activities for our law enforcement agencies.

This importance doesn’t stand alone: it’s driven by Australia’s exposure to the global economic and social system, our attractiveness as a market for illicit commodities and our efficient and reliable financial system. This level of international exposure is clearly reflected in the Australian Crime Commission’s (ACC) assessment that 70% of Australia’s major crime targets live or have important links overseas.

This ASPI Special Report argues that Australia’s current arrangements for gathering and disseminating CrimInt overseas are suboptimal. While additional resources are needed to address this condition, there’s also a need to streamline priority settings and associated collection requirements, provide ways to evaluate and better coordinate the collection of information and intelligence product and expand opportunities to improve training in CrimInt.

We also have opportunities to better use our CrimInt product to influence others, whether it be to influence foreign governments’ intelligence priority-setting or their investment in law enforcement capabilities.

There’s little open-source literature describing the performance of Australia’s CrimInt system overseas, so we interviewed officials from nine major Australian Government agencies involved in CrimInt as either producers or customers, representatives of three state government agencies and experts from three research institutions. We also ran a workshop involving experts on CrimInt to examine domestic priority setting. Using that data, we developed six recommendations to optimise Australia’s CrimInt efforts overseas.

While our main focus is overseas, we’ve found it necessary to consider two domestic aspects of the CrimInt system that are essential to optimising our overall effort.

The first domestically focused recommendation is for an enhanced CrimInt priority-setting mechanism that involves ministers. The new system would also involve a process to set collection requirements, task agencies, manage collection plans and dissemination, and conduct evaluations to align the CrimInt system with intelligence best practices.

On 1 July 2016, the ACC was rebadged as the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC). Its board, which could be nominated as the ‘mission manager’ for Australia’s overseas CrimInt efforts, could drive those new arrangements. That would bring all interested parties together, including the state and territory commissioners of police. Alternatively, the Heads of Commonwealth Operational Law Enforcement Agencies could play that role with support from the ACIC board.

That effort should be communicated through a whole-of-government international engagement strategy that focuses Australia’s overseas CrimInt activities. This is especially important now because four key Australian agencies are contributing to the overseas law enforcement effort and have some officers offshore.

A new Ambassador for Countering Serious and Organised Crime would manage that strategy. This new role will give greater prominence in our foreign policy to countering transnational, serious and organised crime. The Ambassador’s tasks would include examining new relationship opportunities, negotiating agreements, planning and assessing relevant aid and capacity development initiatives, and providing consistent, expert representation at international crime-fighting forums. This should be established as a three-year trial to ensure that the position delivers on the need.

New CrimInt hubs are a key recommendation. This isn’t a recommendation for a separate network: the hubs would support the AFP’s new regional managers and be led by officers with CrimInt experience. They would be the home for other law enforcement, policy and regulatory agencies that conduct CrimInt activities within a given region and would triage information and intelligence collected against the CrimInt collection requirements.

We recommend funding a trial to establish the optimal way to structure and position the CrimInt hubs. In the trial period, one hub would be located offshore (perhaps in Washington or London), one located in Australia (to cover Southeast Asia), and one formed as a ‘strike team’ to be employed in different situations around the world as needed (perhaps starting with China).

The last recommendation focuses on training and reinvigorating strategic CrimInt skills for intelligence, law enforcement and policy professionals.

We think Australia’s system overseas could be enhanced for a resource outlay of between $3.2 million and $14.6 million per year, and elements of this plan could be implemented reasonably quickly. Such moves would prove worthwhile investments in protecting the national interest from the changing criminal threats we face both now and in the future.