Recently I spoke with an administrator in charge of the agency prosecuting green crimes. What follows is a summary:
While provinces are responsible for local law enforcement through public prosecutors’ office , the federal government is responsible for those crimes taking place between provincial borders:
- Illegal wildlife trade
- Pollution
- Illegal fisheries companies
- Illegal forestry
Much of law enforcement is carried out by small organizations that don’t have intelligence-led policing. For those larger organizations, about 15% of resources are devoted to intelligence efforts. Meanwhile, agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife are just beginning to institute an intelligence program designed to disrupt illegal trade and wildlife trafficking..
In this regard, crimes are usually done for two reasons:
- Economic
- Ignorance
That is to say, criminal actors, if they know they are committing illegal acts, do so to avoid costs or make money, whether by through imports or exports, flouting regulations, engaged in food, medicine, artwork (ivory, rosewood, endangered species), consumables…
…the point is that enforcement agents must determine where in the value chain every commodity enters legally or illegally.
Here, intelligence works to research and address several core aspects:
- Tactical operations
- Identify and focus in on where to collect evidence
- Strategic intelligence functions
- Species by species
- What’s the risk in trade/conservation
- Trends analysis (priorities and resources)
- High risk “bad guys”
- Prioritize most impacted species
These aspects then guide the development of high-risk action plans for law enforcement to help manage conservation policy decision making by identifying risk in trade and conservation options.
Where these intelligence groups need help is in the following:
- Big data
- Data analysis
- Sifting through data trends indicators
- Import/export customs
With all the data captured in computers, the ability to search data is limited by the small capacity, so understanding trends and what indicators to pull can provide trade and seizure data to better target shipments.
Thus the role of artificial intelligence in giving interagency support (customs and borders) to analyze big data to determine risk, helping officers identify and prioritize regulated goods and niche crime.
Which is to say, enforcement efforts rely on more people, smarter people, and the right information to feed them.
Academics in this regard can contribute in a number of ways:
-Complexify theories of motivation
-Deterrence theories
-Trade trends
-Economic geography of trade trends
-Trends of illegal trafficking
-Help develop better identification methods
-Biosecurity efforts (where invasive species are accidentally or unintentionally transported.
Further, there are several other points to consider:
- With global warming and environmental scarcity, more extraction of increasingly rare and (thus) valuable species will likely be extracted.
- More stressors on stressed animals means increasing illegal activities will have wider effect on populations.
- Animals tend to be killed before the crime can be enforced.
In a world of polarized opinions, where populations want to have conveniences as well as a pollution free world where the environment is strong, people need to take responsibility in making wise conservation choices.
On the other hand, those who don’t want to comply with these laws, who don’t see the intrinsic value of wild species, and who are fueling investment in technology to harvest these animals and plants increase the amount of damage that can be done.
Hope exists then in cultures making choices to value wildlife and the environment and balance those values with modern conveniences. There is room here for cohabitation.
Degradation is a root cause for insecurity and unrest internationally, as for instance overfishing in Somalia leads to fish stock collapse, poverty and instability. Further, Tanzania, for whom tourism is the second largest contributor to GDP, has lost some 60% of the elephant population.
What then is the possibility of sustainability efforts for states without the economic base needed to fund them?
This is difficult to consider when especially there is no human victim present or immediate, yet it is the communities that pay the price for industrial or political corruption, where environmental costs, climate emissions, and illegal products enter the value chain.
This is the fundamental contradiction of the rule of law – it is both the mechanism for justice as well as oppression.
As such political influence, itself influenced from industry, exerts power over budgets, so that the political apparatus may be at odds with law enforcement – in which case the political pressure to do more or less plays out on the front lines of nature.
Interpol’s environmental crimes program may be a helpful model, externally funded for several purposes:
- Supporting operations for member countries
- Capacity building
- Coordination of operations and sharing information.
To end, a nascent green criminology requires a nascent green intelligence program, funded by nations, supported and developed by academics, and directed by political leaders who are accountable to and serve the interests of the people they represent. Yet it will inevitably be enforcement agencies who are the mechanism by which laws are upheld, and as such, will not only require technological support, but similarly a cultural, economic, philosophical, and even spiritual context that removes the incentives and motivations to commit these crimes in the first place.
https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/elppconference_041917.aspx
conservationcriminology.com
https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Environmental-crime/
https://greencriminology.org/
biosecproject.org
https://www.cites.org/
https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/tertiary/wildlife-crime.html