Marco Dugato

Catholic University of the Sacred Heart | UNICATT · Transcrime

The phenomenon of maritime piracy dates back to the beginning of seafaring. Since the 1980s, maritime piracy has re-emerged as an international problem because of a significant rise in the recorded attacks. The security of maritime routes is a matter of concern for national governments, ship owners and trade companies whose vessels face the risk of...

Environmental taxes and oil market fluctuations can increase road fuel prices significantly and are likely to play a big role in the future. This raises social justice issues, as some low-income households rely on cars for access to services and opportunities but struggle to afford related expenses. The impacts of fuel price increases are unevenly...

Unlabelled: The theft of medicines is a significant component of the illicit trade in pharmaceutical products. Besides small-scale thefts committed for personal usage, organised criminal networks are increasingly targeting high-priced medical products, either to reintroduce them into the legal supply chain or sell them on the black market. This cr...

This study analyses the connection between crime and the structural characteristics of mu-nicipalities. The first part compares the concentration of different crime types in the municipali-ties ranked by their population size across eight countries worldwide. The second part anal-yses the relationships between crime rates, urban scale and urban hie...

This paper proposes an alternative way to analyse and visualize vulnerability to crime at micro-places according to the different combinations of contextual elements that characterize them. The study focuses on violent crimes in the urban area of Iztapalapa, Mexico City. The identification of the risky places follows the Risk Terrain Modelling appr...

Objectives What drives the consumption of illicit cigarettes? While criminology has rarely addressed the divers of the illicit cigarette markets from a theoretical and empirical perspective, studies from other disciplines point to two classes of causes. Some studies stress the impact of cigarette prices and taxes on the market for illicit cigarette...

Spatial crime risk assessment is based on the identification of the environmental conditions that could facilitate crime. Previous applications of this approach mainly rely on single-level analyses neglecting that different contextual factors are likely to influence crime at different geographical levels and to interact with one another in defining...

Many illicit markets are transnational in nature: illicit products are consumed in a country different from the one in which they were produced. Therefore, reconstructing the trafficking network and estimating the size of cross-border illicit flows are crucial steps to gain better understanding of these crimes and to enforce actions aimed at counte...

Organized crime impacts on societies, and it is one of the main threats to global justice. Assessment of the presence and activities of organized crime is therefore crucial for the design of effective policies and actions. Several methodological approaches have been proposed to address the two main challenges implied by this effort: (1) the complex...

This paper introduces and discusses a methodology for estimating the scale of illicit consumption of cigarettes at a national level. After reviewing current data gathering approaches and estimates, the paper delineates a methodology to estimate the consumption of each type of illicit cigarette (i.e., counterfeits, illicit whites, smuggled/trafficke...

While indicators assessing the quality of life often comprise measures of crime or fear of crime, these components usually refer to property or violent crimes. More complex crimes, which may significantly impact on the social, economic, and political conditions of local communities, are often overlooked, mostly due to problems in adequately measuri...

Most of previous research in the field focused on shrinkage (or shortage) as a proxy measure of retail crime (for a definition, see below). According to these studies, measuring shrinkage across firms, sectors and countries provides a measure of the level of retail crime across the same firms, sectors and countries. The starting point of this repo...

This booklet constitutes the first chapter of the ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond Report. It introduces an overview of the transnational trafficking of cigarettes across Europe, Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa. Section 1 describes the two principal forms of cigarette trafficking: i) the one occurring between neighbouring countries and/or...

ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond includes an analysis of the illicit flows of cigarettes moving through EU countries, by also examining the role of and the connections with relevant countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The project identifies and quantifies these flows and highlights the existing connections within political,...

This booklet constitutes the fifth chapter of the ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond Report. It explains the enabling factors driving illicit cigarettes flows: the connections. The connections comprise all the country-level contextual factors and drivers—including key facilitators—of the illicit trade in cigarettes. The term “connections” thus refers...

This booklet constitutes the seventh chapter of the ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond Report. It describes the approach applied to estimate the illicit flows of cigarettes and to identify and analyse their enabling factors. The approach comprises three phases: 1. estimating the volume of the illicit markets of cigarettes in the 57 countries included...

Risk terrain modelling (RTM) is emerging as an effective approach for predicting how and where crimes concentrate within cities and regions. However, in its previous applications there is a tendency to overestimate the influence of external environmental risks and preventive factors. Most studies applying RTM have investigated factors associated wi...

Theft of medicines is emerging as the new frontier of pharmaceutical crime and of organised retail crime. It is attractive to criminals due to the high profits and the relatively low risk, and it is facilitated by many asymmetries of the legal market. Using data retrieved from open sources and institutional reports, this chapter focuses on the thef...

Despite the heterogeneity of the illicit trade in cigarettes within countries, available studies mainly take national markets as their unit of analysis. The innovative contribution of this work is the focus on the phenomenon at the subnational level. Price and non-price factors are examined as determinants of the consumption of illicit cigarettes i...

Mafia homicides are usually committed for retaliation, economic profit, or rivalry among groups. The variety of possible reasons suggests the inefficacy of a preventive approach. However, like most violent crimes, mafia homicides concentrate in space due to place-specific social and environmental features. Starting from the existing literature, thi...

The aim of this study is to provide a picture of security in the retail sector in Italy. In particular, the main purpose is to analyse losses and shrinkage arising from theft, robbery and other crimes, to identify differences among regions and sectors and to provide an overview of the security solutions adopted by retailers.

Questo studio, frutto della collaborazione tra Transcrime e il Dipartimento della Pubblica Sicurezza del Ministero dell’Interno, è uno dei primi tentativi di misurare il danno della criminalità comune in Italia esaminando la gravità dei reati e i costi diretti da essi provocati. Il principale obiettivo di questa ricerca è comprendere l’impatto del...

Questo studio, frutto della collaborazione tra Transcrime e il Dipartimento della Pubblica Sicurezza del Ministero dell’Interno, è uno dei primi tentativi di misurare il danno della criminalità comune in Italia esaminando la gravità dei reati e i costi diretti da essi provocati. Il principale obiettivo di questa ricerca è comprendere l’impatto del...

Counterfeiting is a global phenomenon that threatens the economic stability and sustainable growth of countries. A growing number of researchers, stakeholders, and public or private institutions have been producing a wide variety of studies and estimates on counterfeit markets. However, these studies are varied in scope and sometimes based on uncl...

Despite growing interest in organized crime’s infiltration of the legal economy, research to date has paid little attention to the investments of criminal organizations in real estate. Using data on confiscated assets in 8,092 Italian municipalities between 2000 and 2012, this paper aims to remedy this lack of knowledge. Applying a risk–reward appr...

This study calls for a new direction to be taken in the analysis of, and the fight against, the illicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP) in the European Union (EU). It suggests that the focus should be trained more closely on the reduction of criminal opportunities than on crime control policies. This requires a change of mindset: from the convicti...

The report presents the results about the use of predictive mapping on burglary in three Italian cities (Milan, Rome and Bari).

This working paper aims at developing and testing a methodology for measuring Organized Crime (hereinafter OC) in a list of selected countries of the Latin American region. This study represents one of the first systematic attempts to obtain reliable and comparable measurement of OC presence and threats in the region. The outcomes will provide a mo...

Even though recent data show a decrease in the number of attacks and in the incidence of crimes committed by professional offenders, bank robbery is still a relevant issue in most American and European cities. Still, very few recent studies analyze this topic and most of them overlook the spatial and temporal patterns of this crime. This chapter an...

Along with counterfeiting, theft of medicines is emerging as the new frontier of pharmaceutical crime. In Italy between 2006 and 2013 one hospital out of ten has registered thefts of pharmaceuticals, suffering, on average, an economic loss of about 330 thousands EUR for each episode. This report represents the first study on this booming but almost...

This study is one of the first applications of Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) in an urban context outside the US. It focuses on robberies recorded in Milan, Italy from 2007 to 2010 and applies RTM methodology to analyze urban risk factors in order to forecast future robbery location. Moreover, it discusses the effectiveness of RTM in comparison with a...

The project “EU Survey to assess the level and impact of crimes against business - Stage 2: Piloting the survey module” aims at carrying out a pilot survey on the victimisation of businesses across twenty selected European countries. The main objectives of this project are: • Implementing a business victimisation pilot survey in unexplored countrie...

Measuring Organized Crime (OC) is a challenge that policy makers and law enforcement agencies have to face. Enhancing knowledge on Organized Crime is central for taking effective measures and reducing its human, social and economic consequences. This can be particularly important for Latin American and Caribbean countries, since most of them are af...