V.V. Kashirin, S.V. Ivanov, А.V. Boukhanovsky, P.M.A. Sloot

The paper describes the principles of law enforcement strategies modeling in order to plan and control the evolution of criminal organizations. The importance of this issue is determined by the needs of law enforcement strategies effectiveness improvement as well as its aftermath prognosis quality increase. The methods of criminal structures and its inner dynamical processes modeling and analysis are considered. The structure of criminal organization is modeled as a complex network, which nodes are associated with criminals and edges represent connections between criminals. Connection type depends on specialization of criminal organization. Law enforcement procedure is simulated by removal of specific nodes from the network in order to cause weakening and dismantling of its structure. The targets are chosen according to strategies, which rank the nodes by their properties like degree, betweenness centrality or specialization, and select the outstanding ones. The performance of law-enforcement is measured by metrics, which represent the structural changes within criminal organizations. For illegal production networks the performance is measured by effectiveness, which depends on length of shortest paths between all pairs of nodes. The network with shortest paths of a small length is more effective because it takes fewer steps for information, values and goods to move between the nodes. Removal of central nodes causes increase of shortest paths length and weakening the resilience of criminal structures, which leads to effectiveness decrease. But with consideration of network ability to recover its production chains it might happen that law-enforcement procedure could cause structural reorganization that may result in effectiveness improvement. The speed and effectiveness of information spreading could be used as a metric for law-enforcement procedures as well. Information spreading is modeled by epidemiological model, and within it nodes could be not informed, informed but not spreading and informed and spreading states. Modeling shows that the result of law-enforcement intervention directly depends on topological properties of criminal networks, and the nature of cooperation within them.