The ties that bribe: Corruption's embeddedness in Chicago organized crime*

Joseph, Jared; Smith, Chris

doi:10.1111/1745-9125.12287

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 76 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This facade of patriotism has not only allowed these far‐right groups to appeal to a greater swath of American society, but the meta‐politics 3 and rhetoric of the alt‐right has become so common by the GOP and mainstream conservatives, that the term alt‐right is hollowed out with little distinction today between them and conventional Republicans (e.g., “The Big Lie”) (see Blazak, 2022; Jacobson, 2021; Kyler & Charron‐Chénier, 2022; Lemire, 2002; Reyna et al., 2022; Selvanathan & Leidner, 2022; Thompson & Hawley, 2021). This public relationship between noteworthy members of a political party and a street gang, while not unheard of at the local level is a unique characteristic of Proud Boys, has existed historically but only tacitly between politicians and street gangs (see Hagedorn, 2006, 2008, 2015; Joseph & Smith, 2021; Smith, 2019).…”

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Valasik

Reid

2023

Sociology Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The continued public presence of far-right groups, particularly alt-right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across the United States has made it clear that these groups and their behavior remain a concern. The overall lack of knowledge among policy makers, law enforcement, and community residents on how to deal with alt-right gang members has limited their ability to intervene and prevent violence. The misconception that alt-right gangs are domestic terrorist organizations, primarily driven by racist ideology, ignores just how unrefined and rudimentary the beliefs that connect members together actually are. The reliance on ideology has limited the inclusion of alt-right gangs in conventional gang studies and has directly impacted gang scholars' ability to understand group dynamics among these far-right gangs. This has in turned skewed also how law enforcement is trained to identify and deal with alt-right gangs. This manuscript overviews the need to rectify the historical apathy of traditional gang scholars and law enforcement in dealing with far-right/alt-right gangs.We conclude with a discussion on how the mainstreaming of alt-right groups over the last few years has accelerated and the growing need to explicitly treat these groups as street gangs.

show abstract

Section: What Are Alt‐right Gangs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Valasik

Reid

2023

Sociology Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This is in part because criminals do their best to remain undetected, but also, and in fact primarily so, because this information is often classified and restricted to law enforcement agencies. Despite these difficulties, many recent works have demonstrated the usefulness of network science to investigate criminal networks, with examples including cartel detection 12 , corruption risk in contracting markets 13 , money laundering 14 , identification of corrupt politicians via voting networks 15 , dark web pedophile rings 16 , criminal conspiracy networks of companies 17 , modular structure of crime organizations 18 , political corruption networks 19 , organized crime networks 20 , controllability of criminal networks 21 , resilience of drug trafficking 22 , as well as police criminal intelligence networks 23 . Nevertheless, and despite the fascinating research that has already been made, we still need to identify overarching common properties and dynamical aspects of criminal networks, which might allow us to develop simple models that describe fundamental features and provide valuable insights into organized crime.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universality of political corruption networks

Martins

Cunha

Hanley

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Corruption crimes demand highly coordinated actions among criminal agents to succeed. But research dedicated to corruption networks is still in its infancy and indeed little is known about the properties of these networks. Here we present a comprehensive investigation of corruption networks related to political scandals in Spain and Brazil over nearly three decades. We show that corruption networks of both countries share universal structural and dynamical properties, including similar degree distributions, clustering and assortativity coefficients, modular structure, and a growth process that is marked by the coalescence of network components due to a few recidivist criminals. We propose a simple model that not only reproduces these empirical properties but reveals also that corruption networks operate near a critical recidivism rate below which the network is entirely fragmented and above which it is overly connected. Our research thus indicates that actions focused on decreasing corruption recidivism may substantially mitigate this type of organized crime.

show abstract

“…In line with other research on social systems [7][8][9][10][11] , complex networks can suitably describe the intricate relations among criminals and reveal the patterns based on which criminal organizations operate. Beyond theoretical explorations, recent articles have empirically demonstrated that these methods can be useful in investigations involving drug trafficking 12 , political networks 13,14 , police intelligence networks 15 , cartel detection 16 , money laundering 17 , pedophile rings 18 , and a range of other examples [19][20][21][22][23][24] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Machine learning partners in criminal networks

Lopes

Cunha

Martins

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research has shown that criminal networks have complex organizational structures, but whether this can be used to predict static and dynamic properties of criminal networks remains little explored. Here, by combining graph representation learning and machine learning methods, we show that structural properties of political corruption, police intelligence, and money laundering networks can be used to recover missing criminal partnerships, distinguish among different types of criminal and legal associations, as well as predict the total amount of money exchanged among criminal agents, all with outstanding accuracy. We also show that our approach can anticipate future criminal associations during the dynamic growth of corruption networks with significant accuracy. Thus, similar to evidence found at crime scenes, we conclude that structural patterns of criminal networks carry crucial information about illegal activities, which allows machine learning methods to predict missing information and even anticipate future criminal behavior.

show abstract

The ties that bribe: Corruption's embeddedness in Chicago organized crime*

Abstract: tos, and Criminology editors and reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this work. We thank Duncan Temple Lang and John Daniels for computational support.

Cited by 7 publications

References 76 publications

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream

Universality of political corruption networks

Machine learning partners in criminal networks

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About