Future crime

Abstract

The nature of crime is clearly changing. To illustrate, consider findings from the Crime Survey of England and Wales (ONS, 2016). For the first time, this sweep of the survey included questions about cyber crime. And while it only included questions about a handful of such offences, it suggested that at least half the crimes committed in the recall year, that were included in the survey, involved the misuse of computers. As much cyber crime will go unnoticed, and many types of online offending were not considered in the survey, this is likely to be an underestimate of the scale of offending. While many new forms of offending will be facilitated by the internet, new forms of crime opportunity will not be limited to the kinds of offending we commonly associate with the term cyber crime and it is hence important to think more broadly than this.