Evolution, crime science and terrorism

Crime and terrorism are not static problems. They change on timescales from days to decades. In part, this flux stems from offenders adapting to exploit opportunities afforded by exogenous social and technological developments in society, and to cope with threats from other offenders. But significantly too it derives from arms races between offenders and those on the security side. On the security side, however, the consensus among change-minded commentators has been that ‘contemporary crime control policies are hopelessly static’ (Cohen et al., 1995:216; see also Dietl, 2008). Ekblom (1997, 2016a) argues that to win campaigns rather than merely individual battles against criminals and terrorists, we must routinely out-innovate adaptive offenders against a background of technological and social change that may first favour one side, and then the other. The classic example is Shover’s (1996) study of safes and safe-breakers, where new, emerging technologies including combination locks, cutting tools, new hardened alloy casings and so forth flipped the advantage back and forth between the opponents.