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Digital surveillance – Background, emergence and research: Criminological research on surveillance is relatively scarce. This is even more striking because criminology is often grounded in empirical research in relation to tackling crime and disorder. Moreover, the private sector has made all sorts of surveillance services accessible to the public at large. These services generate data which routinely provide input to build user profiles, are resold to other tech companies and can be requested by the authorities to investigate crimes. In surveillance studies, these developments have led to discussions about theoretical and normative frameworks how (digital) surveillance relates to security issues. These discussions center less on 'what works', but more on 'what assumptions underlie the data', 'what are the effects and consequences', or even 'where does it stop'. In order to provide an impetus for more attention to surveillance as a criminological topic, this article presents an overview of the history of surveillance studies and provides some perspectives for criminological research, ranging from a 'digital ethics' to the 'surveillance experiences' of the people who watch and are being watched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw from aspects of Black's theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling transaction failures at the highest levels of the cocaine trade in the Netherlands. The results show that outcomes were determined by the way in which conflicts arose; lost product due to negligence and fraud increased the likelihood of violence. The fragile equilibrium between peaceful or violent resolution depended on whether the guilty party accepted blame or provided evidence that could account for losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decisive action against criminal outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs) ranks high on the criminal justice agenda. Nevertheless, in many Western European countries the number of OMCG chapters has increased rapidly. Official OMCG support clubs also have mushroomed. The present study extends prior research from the Netherlands and elsewhere by employing a gang database of 1,617 OMCG members and 473 support club members maintained by the Dutch police and examining members' juvenile and adult criminal careers based on judicial data. While committing an offense was no prerequisite of being included in the database, criminal career data show that the majority of OMCG and support club members is convicted at least once. In addition, we find there is ample variation in both the level and shape of these individual's criminal trajectories. In line with prior research, the majority of OMCG and support club members are found to be adult onset offenders. A considerable share of both samples however, follows criminal trajectories characterized by early onset, frequent and persistent criminal behavior. Building on prior theoretical accounts of OMCG evolution, these findings are interpreted against the background of recent changes in the Dutch outlaw biker landscape. Implications for the Dutch whole-of-government approach are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]