Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies ...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies:
A Review of the Literature
While the measures of efficiency recommended by Blakey and his colleagues set more modest
(and perhaps more realistic) objectives for evaluations, they are plagued by all the abovementioned
shortcomings of administrative body-counts. One would think that the ultimate
objective is impact, rather than mere efficiency, however difficult the measure of impact may be.
Harms Produced by Organized Crime
Maltz (1990) calls for harm-based measures of OC. Thus, assessments of OC control efforts
should be based on the extent to which physical, economic, psychological, community, and
societal harms, engendered by OC, have been mitigated. According to Maltz, evaluations might
measure the volume of harm occurring in a jurisdiction on an annual basis. Before a reduction in
the overall harm is attributed to a specific agency’s control efforts, the difficult task of
determining the contribution of other factors must be undertaken. Other factors that may play a
role in harm reduction include: the efforts of other agencies; natural changes in supply or
demand (e.g., changing drug preferences, cocaine crop failure); non-enforcement phenomena
(e.g., the death of a key OC figure); measurement error (e.g., less information available on a
given activity than in the previous year); unknown sources; and random fluctuations (Maltz,
1990:20).
Measuring the harms produced by OC is more complex than in the case of conventional crimes
such as robbery. Victims frequently report such conventional crimes to the police or mention
them in victimization surveys. By contrast, the recipients of the illicit goods and services
furnished by criminal organizations act voluntarily and, hence, do not view themselves as
victims. Furthermore, the victims of non-consensual OC activities (e.g., extortion) often stay
quiet due to intimidation.
This harm-based approach is intuitively compelling as the ultimate goal of more broadly based
OC control efforts is to minimize the adverse effects of criminal organizations. Whether the aim
of a particular program is to “decapitate” a criminal organization or to reduce the supply of an
illicit substance or service, achieving these aims is of limited value if the harms produced by the
organization or substance are unabated. Measuring harms, however, is no simple task.
The first category of harm defined by Maltz (1990) is physical harm. Even this, the most
concrete of all harms, is difficult to measure with accuracy. The counting of acts of violence is
impeded by a substantial “dark figure”. Even homicide, purportedly the most accurate barometer
of violence, is counted with a significant degree of error (Gabor, Hung, Mihorean, and St. Onge,
2002). Questions arise as to whether a violent death was due to an attack, was self-inflicted
deliberately, or was unintentional. Also, the assessment of whether a homicide was a “gangland
slaying” is not always clear.
Measuring economic harms incurred by victims is also complex. The direct damage done to a
commercial building that has been burned down can be quantified quite readily. Calculating the
secondary effects--the loss of a business, need for added security, higher insurance premiums,
loss of wages, and other, more enduring effects—is a more difficult undertaking. Also, the
victim in this case would include the owners and occupants of the building, employees, as well
16 | Research and Statistics Division / Department of Justice Canada