Public Policies to Strike the Resilience of Criminal Organizations

The techniques offered by the analysis of social networks have rapidly increased in the last years in the study of criminal networks and their results influence the construction of policies to defeat them. In this way, the concept of social network was applied to the study of crime and to the several forms in which it operates and organizes its activities, but above all to the analysis of transnational crime and terrorist networks. As it is well known criminal organizations covert social networks to pursue illegal purposes concealing their shady businesses and maximizing their utility function. The members of criminal networks trust one another and look for protection or for a privileged access to certain social as well as economic resources, often through the mediation of individuals who offer their services in a “non-transparent” or irregular way. Therefore, they cannot be considered as simple networks of interpersonal relationships among individuals operating “in the shadow”, or anyway in a criminal contest. In fact, criminal networks have peculiar characteristics which cannot be underestimated or ignored in trying to develop effective preventive and contrast measures and tools to combat them. Several studies highlighted how criminal and terrorist organizations carry out their activities in dynamic contexts, in which the competitive pressure and repressive intervention by the governments constantly test their existence. This is the reason why, in order to survive and keep on growing up, they had to develop a high resistance ability as well as a high adaptability to the changing conditions of the environment they operate in. The nature and source of such abilities of criminal and terrorist organizations have been deeply analysed in several researches. In fact, such organizations, due to their topological characteristics, are considered as an extreme and very interesting case of failure resilient networks, i.e. networks which are resilient towards the so-called “cascade failures”. This paper will focus on this topic analysing the structure and resilience ability of three criminal networks, the first one set up for international drug and psychotropic substance trafficking, the second one operating in the field of the provision of public services (Healthcare) and the third composed for the aggression of public contracts for the restoration of public monuments of architectural value. The analysis is carried out using an interdisciplinary approach as well as the typical techniques and concepts of the Social Network Analysis in order to develop a reliable indicator of Criminal Network Resilience. Obviously, the use of this indicator requires an adaptation of Criminal Investigation Knowledge Systems or Criminal Investigation Expert Systems where they already exist, or their ex novo introduction in the countries where they are missing.