John Denley joined the National Crime Agency as Deputy Director for Cyber in May 2021 and has been the Director of Investigations since August 2022, responsible for leading the investigative response to the most Serious Organised Crime threats facing the UK.
John also spent eleven years in senior police leadership roles that involved managing risk and leading change in politically sensitive and complex operational environments including serious and organised crime, counter terrorism, kidnap and cybercrime.
A published academic author focused on enhancing our understanding of the threat from organised crime and terrorism and the effectiveness of the CONTEST strategy.
Presentation
Prevention Not Cure: Targeting Co-offenders and Convergence Spots to Stop Organised Crime from Happening
Dr John Denley1, Prof. Barak Ariel
1National Crime Agency, United Kingdom, , United Kingdom
Serious and organised crime is an endemic social problem. Despite the extensive literature on organised criminality, the evidence is primarily qualitative, based on selective samples, or both. Moreover, the interventions currently available to prevent organised crime have shown little success in curbing this multibillion-pound industry. Social control apparatuses such as law enforcement are often understudied and, when such research evidence exists, it is often based on weak causal estimates of treatment effects.
This research attempts to fill these gaps by answering three interrelated primary research questions. First, whom should the police target to prevent them entering organised crime groups, rather than pursuing them once they’re in? Analysis of population-level intelligence and records on organised crime show that young offenders who have yet to join an organised crime group provide a suitable yet under-investigated group of offenders. Second, where are serious and organised crime offenders’ haunts or hangouts? By identifying the ‘convergence spots’ of gangs and young offenders, new locations can be identified and targeted with protect and prevent police tactics. Third, do prevention programmes effectively reduce crime originating from organised crime offenders? Using a cluster randomised control trial methodology, I test the deterrent effect of a two-pronged intervention aimed at preventing young offenders recruitment into gangs and organised crime groups. The experiment yielded a reduction in re-offending in the magnitude of 35% relative to control conditions.
The study provides a viable and replicable crime prevention alternative to ‘arresting our way’ out of youth crime through prevention, not cure.