Security threat: actors

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Individuals

Many different individual (criminal) actors can be distinguished. For instance adolescence that commit limited offends due to boredom. Many criminological research on the life course of offenders, shows that there is a peak in age between 15 and 25. Other individuals are for instance life course persisters with a financial gain motive, serial offenders due to compulsive behavior or emotional offenders (examples are homicide or sexual assault). Finally, there are so called lone wolves.

Lone wolves

Lone wolves do not operate within a group or in the role of a steady member of a large terrorist cell or of an organization. The inspiration of a lone actor terrorist, also frequently described as ‘lone actor terrorists’, frequently comes from publications of like-minded individuals through online and offline contact. The explosive amount of violence, that is often used by lone actor terrorists, frequently overshadows their ideology and becomes the ideology itself. A significant difference between jihadist and right-wing lone actors lies in their psychopathology.

Groups

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Organised

Until the 1990s, organised crime was known as crime carried out by groups with a pyramidal structure containing a strict hierarchy, such as maffia organisations in Italy or the United States of America. In 1983 RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was introduced, cleaning out criminal “enterprises”. This led to a shift from pyramid structures within criminal organisations to ‘nodal networks’ and ‘cells’.

Nodal networks

In between the roaring twenties and 1990s most organised criminal networks were mostly formed from families with a hierarchical structure, after the 1990s social embeddedness became more important. Criminal networks dispersed and formed smaller groups that were connected by ‘facilitators’ and ‘nodes’. Facilitators provide services for several smaller groups, such as bookkeeping (laundering money). Nodes are connecting individuals that can bring together different groups, such as an individual with a large (criminal) social network that can introduce key players. Often these nodal networks are drug related crime and/or white collar crime. Investigating these smaller, nodal networks posed a challenge for law enforcement due to the fact that they are less visible than large enterprises or syndicates. Therefore, law enforcement agencies focus on identifying facilitators to roll up entire networks.

Cells

The term ‘cell’ comes from epidemiology, a discipline that forms many similarities to criminology. In history, when a pandemic emerged, the treatment of the pandemic often flowed over to the treatment of crime (during the plague, lepracy and smallpox). A criminal ‘cell’ can lead back to a common origin, like a disease or virus can be traced back through contacts with an original source.

A terrorist cell is often a small group, that is either self-financing and organised, without being directed by larger organisations, but following their ideologies. For cells, there is no need to maintain an infrastructure and operational costs remain relatively low. Mainly when their modus operandi remains simple, costs stay low, for instance in the example of a terrorist cell carrying out an attack with a rented van or with three attackers with knives and/or firearms.

Peer groups (impulse)

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Here you can find the other security threats related pages:

• Security threats: acts
• Security threats: mitigations