Security threat: mitigations

Mitigating and preventing crime can happen before, during and the act (to prevent it from happening again). The prevention of criminal acts often has a two-dimensional basis. When looking at the development phase of the criminal act itself and the type of actor, different types of prevention techniques can be used. Measures can either target the first dimension, being the target group (criminal actors, specific situations or potential victims) or target the second dimension, being the criminal act phase. Three phases can be distinguished in the development of a criminal acts. Within the primary phase, general precautionary measures can be used to prevent crime, targeting all actors, situations and victims. Secondary prevention can be used when the first symptoms of a specific type of act emerge, such as early interventions for violent adolescents. Tertiary measures for the prevention of criminal acts are used when the problem is occurring, in order to mitigate an active problem.

Preventing is better than healing. By using different types of analyses, registered criminal activity can be used to predict criminal acts in the future. Brantingham and Brantingham described the predictive dimensions of crime. A crime always has a legal dimension (a law must be broken), a victim dimension (something or someone will be targeted), an offender dimension (an actor to commit the crime) and a spatio-temporal dimension (a crime will always take place at a certain location and at a certain time). These four elements, regarding the environmental aspects of crime, seem to show a steady pattern over time, for all criminal acts, and therefore a large part of criminal acts can be predicted.

Analyzing: environmental criminology

Environmental criminology

Environmental criminology is the study of the patterns of crime in space and time. Brantingham and Brantingham, the founding theorists of environmental criminology, in 1981 described how a committed crime always has four elements. These four elements can be analyzed separately or together. Using geographical information systems (GIS), patterns in the distribution of crime locations can be analyzed to localize hot spots (increased aggregations of crime locations) or to calculate the most likely location of a perpetrator.

GIS are often used to analyze burglary, serial offenders, human trafficking routes and other types of crimes that occur concentrated in both time and space.

Environmental Criminology regarding terrorist attacks, one of the largest security threats, has mostly focused on finding spatial and temporal clusters. Most pertinent are recent findings in a study of Marchment, Bouhana and Gill (2020), illustrating that terrorists display similar distance-to-crime patterns as other perpetrators. This means that proven preventive strategies such as correlated walk analysis (predicting an individuals’ movements) and using GEO-ict techniques to predict the living area of a perpetrator would also be applicable in tracking down a terrorist attacker.

Routine activities

Routine activities are the day-to-day activities each individual carries out. Travelling from and to your home after a workday or leisure activity, will be a routine for most individuals. The Routine Activity Theory describes the fact that these routine activities are similar for criminals. Offenders show no different patterns within their geographical movements, then any other individual travelling in between their activities. Here are some examples of threats that can be mitigated: burglar, serial offender, thief, sexual offender, robber, physical offender, vandalist or arsonist.

Awareness space

Most individuals carry out their routine activities in the same geographical area throughout their life. They have created a mental map of the geographical space around their home, work and leisure activities. They know the area very well and are aware of all important landmarks. Most criminals have made these same mental maps of their environment eg. awareness space. Here are some examples of threats that can be mitigated: burglar, serial offender, thief, sexual offender, robber, physical offender, vandalist, terrorist, murderer or arsonist.

Predicting: geographically profiling

By calculating a perpetrators previous crime locations, geographical profilers can map out their awareness space and are in some cases able to calculate where a perpetrator’s residence can be found within a 100 meter radius. By using geographical analyses, one can also identify and test significant clustering of crime, frequently described as hot- or cold spots.

Correlated walk analysis

A fairly unknown, but efficient geographical analysis tool, is the correlated walk analysis. Using available geographical data from one perpetrator or individual (such as a victim), a route can be predicted. For instance, if a homicide has taken place and there is no body to be found, but several locations of the whereabouts of the victim that day are known, correlated walk analysis can be used to narrow down the search area. Also, during a manhunt scenario, correlated walk analysis could predict a perpetrators next steps and location. Here are some examples of threats that can be mitigated: terrorism, serial offences, sexual offences, homicide, drug trafficking routes or human trafficking routes.

Convex hull and hot spot analysis

An often used method of geographically analyzing crime data is hot spot analysis. Using estimation models, such as Kernel Density Estimation, significant micro places can be identified, in which crimes occur significantly more or less than in other areas. These micro places are also known as hot spots or cold spots. Here are some examples of threats that can be mitigated: burglary, robbery, vandalism, sexual offences, serial offences or arson.

Protecting

There are different 'subjects' that can be protected. There can be made a distinction between protecting VIPs, protecting buildings and objects or protecting public spaces.

Protecting public spaces

Public space is generally open and accessible to members of the public, such as roads, parks and municipal buildings. Public space includes semi-public spaces, such as train stations, and privately-owned spaces such as shopping malls. Some areas in public space, where large crowds form, might be considered by a municipality as having a higher risk of a terrorist attack than others. These busy areas generally appear because of some specific activity in the area, such as people visiting a concert or commuters at a train station. Public areas that are vulnerable to terrorism (or other crime) can be considered as “soft targets”. The EU project PRoTECT has developed a manual to asses vulnerabilities of public spaces and evaluated solutions to mitigate and thus protect these public spaces.

EU Prevention Strategies

The four pillars of the EU’s Counter-Terrorism strategy (prevent, protect, pursue and respond) constitute a comprehensive, accurate and proportionate response against international terrorist threats. The EU Prevention Strategy requires work at national, European and international levels to prevent and reduce terrorist attacks worldwide and create resilience as opposed to vulnerability. The EU funds different programs, such as Horizon 2020, FP7, Internal Security Fund Police, to support research and implementation of prevention strategies.

Horizon Europe

Horizon Europe is the follow-up of the big Horizon 2020 EU Research and Innovation program from 2021 onwards.

Horizon 2020

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation program ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private investment that this money will attract. It promises more breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market.

FP7

The complete name of FP7 is the 7th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development of the EU. It lasted for seven years from 2007 until 2013. The funds of this program was spent on grants to research actors all over Europe and beyond, in order to co-finance research, technological development and demonstration projects and is the precursor to Horizon 2020.

Internal Security Fund Police

The Internal Security Fund (ISF) is set up for the period 2014-20, with a total of EUR 3.8 billion for the seven years. The Fund will promote the implementation of the Internal Security Strategy, law enforcement cooperation and the management of the Union's external borders. The ISF is composed of two instruments, ISF Borders and Visa and ISF Police.

The ISF Police component of the Internal Security Fund will contribute to ensuring a high level of security in the EU. Within this general objective, the Funds' activities will focus on achieving two specific objectives:

• Fight against crime: combating cross-border, serious and organised crime including terrorism, and reinforcing coordination and cooperation between law enforcement authorities and other national authorities of EU States, including with EUROPOL and other relevant EU bodies, and with relevant non-EU and international organisations;
• Managing risk and crisis: enhancing the capacity of EU States and the Union for managing effectively security-related risk and crisis, and preparing for protecting people and critical infrastructure against terrorist attacks and other security related incidents.

EU ISFP PRoTECT

The EU PRoTECT project is funded by the ISF Police component. PRoTECT stands for Public Resilience using Technology to Counter Terrorism and aims to strengthen local authorities’ capabilities in Public Protection by putting in place an overarching concept where tools, technology, training and field demonstrations will lead to situational awareness and improve direct responses to secure public places pre, in, and after a terrorist threat. This cross sectoral project is an initiative of the Core group of the European Network of Law Enforcement Technology Services (ENLETS).

Here you can find the other security threats related pages:

• Security threats: acts
• Security threats: actors