Abstract
This paper is based upon a presentation given at an international conference in Courmayeur, Italy, in November 2003. The conference was entitled ‘Crime and Technology: New Frontiers for Regulation, Law Enforcement and Research’. It provided an opportunity to review the effects of technology on all aspects of crime — both the extent to which technological developments contribute to crime and also to the ways in which technology can help to prevent or detect it. The presentation was intended for a general audience and this paper is not, therefore, a research paper, but it does raise some issues of policy relevance to an international journal. It concentrates specifically on new challenges for law enforcement and how these might be dealt with. The basic thesis of the paper is that there are new and emerging crimes that require a more systematic and better co-ordinated approach than has been evident hitherto. Of course crime necessarily changes with time and circumstance; as Ken Pease (personal communication) says, horse thieves have been replaced in large part by car thieves, and there are many more of them. But with the rate of change of technological innovation, and the globalisation of industry, the opportunities for crime are rising at an unprecedented rate and there is, therefore, an urgency to the need for a more appropriate response to crime and disorder.
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Laycock, G. (2004). New Challenges for Law Enforcement. In: Savona, E.U. (eds) Crime and Technology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2924-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2924-0_5
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