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Chapter 1 - An Overview of Criminal Investigation

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Chapter 1 - An Overview of Criminal Investigation

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- Criminal investigation is an applied science that involves the study of facts, used to identify, locate and prove the guilt of an accused criminal. A completecriminal investigation can include searching, interviews, interrogations, evidence collection and preservation and various methods of investigation
-Investigators must be intelligent and have a keen eye for detail, as well as a strong nerve as they'll often encounter unpleasant cases.

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-Criminal investigations don't just materialize out of thin air. They begin with a crime scene. Nailing every last aspect of the crime scene is of the utmost importance, and there are a few ways to do so.
-Note taking, sketching and photography are the big ones. If you can't sketch well then fear not, digital sketching software is available.

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Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Techniques

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-One of the most important skills an officer can possess is effective report writing. A good report isn't just for your own records, although it's a good place to start. Reports will be used in court, and depending on how well it's written can make a big impact on the outcome.
-The biggest thing an officer can do to insure quality is to take the time to write it well the first time

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Report Writing for Police and Security pt. 1

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-One of the more fascinating and exciting aspects of criminal investigations, there are many ways to go about this. There are reports, records and databases. Secondary characters who are not suspects, such as witnesses or informants. Lastly, there are the suspects themselves.
-When dealing with the latter two cases, there are either interviews or interrogations performed. There are many different styles of interrogating to cover, but for the most part it's more formal and in control than an interview.

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-Statistically, murder is the least significant of the violent crimes, yet it receives extensive media attention. This crime may appear to be occurring more frequently, but it is actually declining

-Males are most often the victims and the perpetrators in homicides. Males are 10 times more likely to commit murder than females.

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Could This be the First Murder Solved by Artificial Intelligence?

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-Stalking is considered willful or intentional commission of acts that causes a reasonable person to fear death or serious bodily injury, places the victim in fear of death, and places the victim in fear bodily injury.
-Could be by somebody intimate or formerly intimate, an acquaintance or a stranger.
-One out of four cases are cyber-stalking.

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Alexis Moore knows what it means to be the victim of a cyberstalker.

Her ex-boyfriend hacked into her online accounts and her cellphone, and emptied her bank account-an experience that was so traumatic she attempted suicide in 2006. One of the hardest things, she recalls, was convincing authorities that a crime had taken place.

"I understand that to them there's no chalk around a body," she says. "There's no tape at a stalking or cyberstalking crime scene, but victims are falling through the cracks. "

But now, Moore and others who are advocates for domestic abuse victims say technology has come up with yet another worrisome tool: tracking apps installed in smartphones.

The apps, a popular option for parents monitoring their kids' whereabouts, can also be used to monitor and exert control over a spouse, partner or date-often the first sign that a relationship could turn, or has already become, abusive-and they are not only changing the way advocates think about getting victims out of harm's way, but affecting the way police departments respond to stalking cases.

Abusers who once simply followed victims by car, monitored their laptop activity, or even installed a GPS tracking device in their vehicle, now have a powerful new tool that has made it easier for anyone who wishes to track someone for the purposes of monitoring and controlling their behavior.

"For an already abusive partner, these apps just amplify a situation," says Jessica Yaffa, a domestic violence survivor as well as co-founder of No Silence No Violence.

Yaffa, who is also co-founder of The Restoration Inn, a women's rehab center for those suffering relationship abuse and substance disorders, adds: "Part of what happens is isolation: the goal for the abuse itself is to pull the partner away from things outside the relationship."

A 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey released by the Centers for Disease Control, found that one in six women and one in 19 men were stalked at some point in their lifetime. The majority of stalkers are male, and are usually current or ex-partners or spouses.

Although the rate of serious intimate partner violence declined 72 percent for women and 64 percent for men from 1994 to 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, many domestic violence advocates are still concerned that stalking, a behavior often observed shortly before intimate partner homicides is becoming easier than ever. (76 percent of female homicide victims were stalked by their murderers, according to the latest data available, from 1999.)

One recent example is Jesus A. Lopez, who used a cellphone equipped with GPS that he placed in his estranged wife's car for the purposes of tracking her, according to the Chicago Tribune. Lopez was arrested in February and subsequently charged with stalking. He also has a conviction for violating an order of protection in addition to a few domestic violence arrests.

In January, a U.K. man is alleged to have stabbed the man his wife was sleeping with after tracking him down through a mobile phone app, according to the London Daily Mail.

However, it's not always the people tracking their partners and spouses who are charged with a crime.

Last September, Hammad Akbar was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia for allegedly "conspiring to advertise" and sell a Spyware app, StealthGenie. An FBI statement announced that it was the first ever criminal case regarding the sale and advertisement of a mobile device spyware app.

Tracking someone's movements via phone is only one way an abuser can terrorize a partner or a former partner.

Los Angeles Deputy City Attorney Eve Sheedy and counsel for domestic violence policy says it's not unusual for abusers to encourage others to carry out violence for them through social networks and other Internet forums.

"The ability to track someone's movements by hiding a tracking device on their car, downloading a tracking app on their phone or otherwise 'electronically stalking' makes already vulnerable victims feel even more vulnerable," Sheedy said in an email to The Crime Report.

"It also has the potential to increase the threat of violence, as batterers can easily reach out to others through the internet or social media and get others to carry through for them, e.g., the batterer who posts that his victim has a 'rape fantasy,' posts her address and encourages others to fulfill that fantasy by breaking into her residence and raping her."

To make things worse, the barrier to obtaining sophisticated technology is now lower, according to Michael P. Boulette, a Minneapolis divorce attorney and an adjunct professor of family law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

"Not so long ago, it took a motivated spouse to use GPS or other expensive tracking device," says Boulette, who notes there has been a "sea change" since in access to electronic information that is often not recognized by authorities.

"It's harder to explain to judges, because even the youngest are in their 40s and 50s," he says. "To explain tracking apps (is) a constant process of education."

Minnesota Senator Al Franken introduced a bill in 2014, called The Location Privacy Protection Act, which would require companies to obtain permission before collecting location data from smartphones, tablets, in-car navigation devices, etc., before sharing it with others. This legislation would not apply to parents tracking children. The legislation has been held in the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law since last June.

However, some advocates argue such legislation is only symbolic-as long as police and others on the front lines don't make the issue a priority.

"The laws are good for awareness," says Alexis Moore "But it's been 10 years since I began doing this and (although) we have better responses, they're still backburning these cases."

Moore wrote a book exploring the topic- Cyber Self-Defense -and now serves as a risk management consultant for victims of domestic violence and stalking.

"I'm still seeing eyes glazed over and rolled back in their head," she says.

"If you show up with the victim, if you have someone like me call, you get a little further; but it shouldn't have to be that way."

To make matters worse for victims of tracking and online harassment, the National Stalking Resource Center victim helpline has been closed since 2010, Moore says.

Moore points to one particular stalking unit in San Diego as a good model for stalking units across the country.

San Diego Deputy District Attorney Rachel Solov is in charge of the stalking unit, which provides a stalking information line and security tips for victims on its website.

Boulette says current laws don't always make it easy for police to take stalking seriously as a key part of domestic violence, however.

"It may be that law enforcement is in a difficult role in the first place. There is an emotional and physical component of domestic violence, and the law typically only recognizes one as domestic violence, but apps can be used as effectively as a fist as a method of control," he says.

Even when authorities take the danger seriously, their ability to address it is hampered by the lack of appropriate equipment, says Cindy Southworth, executive vice president and founder of Safety Net Technology Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

"Most smaller (police) departments don't have these tech labs," says Southworth, who helps officers navigate the complexities of cellphone tracking technology as part of her work with state and federal agencies and private industry to improve safety and protect victim privacy.

"I've seen a lot of progress from 15 years ago, and officers are more tech savvy," she says. "But they're still underfunded; so there's not enough training and resources."

Another problem that police, domestic violence advocates and attorneys wrestle with is the evolving nature of the technology. Once an app is identified as a potential risk or threat to privacy, another pops up in its place or users are asked to upgrade to a different version.

"Technology is ever-evolving," says Southworth. "Anti-spyware software creators try to keep up with the spyware; however the spyware developers are constantly trying to get away from detection."

Boulette, who often deals with instances where his clients are being tracked by spouses, says he also finds it difficult to keep up with the changes.

"I have seen that as soon as we're tipped off, it's one of these things where as soon as we're educated about what's behind these apps, time's up," Boulette says.

Southworth says there are ways for victims to discover they are being tracked and prevent it to the best of their ability.

"Abusers often tip their hand by saying, 'Why did you go see your sister? Why were you at the grocery store at this time?'" Southworth says.

Often, victims can get a prepaid phone from Target for calls of a more sensitive nature, Southworth says.

There are many different kinds of tracking apps available for cell phones. Some apps are an extra service that cell phone providers give their customers, especially to locate their phone in case it gets lost or to keep tabs on children; but the user is asked for permission to install the tracking app before it activates.

Remote Spyware Tracking

In recent years, however, spyware has become far more prevalent, and users can track the phones remotely, according to Brook Schaub, manager of computer forensics and discovery at Eide Bailly LLP and a former sergeant of the St. Paul, Minn. police department.

"That usually requires some kind of payment or subscription to a service, often a monthly fee sometimes for unlimited access, to get information. It only takes a few minutes in possession of the cell phone to initiate the app without the person's knowledge, but I see a lot of that," Schaub says.

"It's not infrequent that I get cases where a spouse is concerned that something has been placed on their cell or laptop to track their activity."

Then there are devices with GPS tracking that can be hidden in a partner or spouse's vehicle. These devices often have magnets on them that can be stuck to the undercarriage of the vehicle, Schaub says, which are known as "slammers" by law enforcement because you can easily slam them on a vehicle. Partners can wait until a spouse is at work or otherwise occupied to install them.

One type of slammer requires the device be retrieved from the vehicle and the archived data loaded onto a mapping program on a computer through a USB. The other is a real time tracking device where the spouse can log in on the Internet and see where the vehicle is at any given time and a history of where it has been, and those often require a subscription payment.

Schaub does everything he can to find out whether a device is being tracked, but it has its challenges.

"It's meant to be stealthy and maybe you just luck out and find a website in the browsing history and the computer reaching out to a website," he says. "We're also looking at internet protocol, addresses, particular drivers [software programs] or DLLs [dynamic link library].

"One of the first programs would hide information as a text message in a temporary file, and within all of those thousands of text messages you had to find very specific keywords."

According to Schaub, "You can often go to the Apple store and have them wipe your phone of all apps. Sometimes Apple can tell you if an app is an anomaly. It all depends on whether you're looking for piece of mind versus evidence."

Reaching Out to Victims

Yaffa says the apps make it "an increasingly difficult task" for advocates to reach out and help abuse victims. But she and her staff try to identify places the victim and abuser have designated as "safe spaces" that are okay for the victim to visit, such as church and other community spaces.

"We even meet them in grocery store aisles if need be," she says. "We tell women to leave the phone at home, and we know of course she might be punished for not answering the phone, but we say maybe if she takes a short visit to a coffee shop near home she can say she was vacuuming and didn't hear."

Boulette says victims can also seek expert help to discover and document whether their phones are being tracked. But that can be an expensive task that is only open to those privileged enough to afford it.

Often, abuse victims have lost financial control, so paying for this is an extra burden.

"The experts I work with in Minneapolis cost anywhere in the $500 to $1000 range," Boulette says. "It depends on what is there. The deeper forensic work could be more expensive. It's not a small cost."

Advocates and lawyers recommend documenting any kind of stalking, whether it be acknowledgement from a forensic computer analyst that the phone is being tracked or a screenshot of social media harassment.

What Victims Can Do in Court

Laws related to stalking didn't really become a priority until the 1990s, so it is a relatively new and inconsistent area of the law.

For many states, there needs to be "one or more intentional acts that evidence a continuity of purpose," according to a 2012 report to Congress from the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women on grant funds used to address stalking.

Some states define stalking as a crime of general intent while others define it as a specific intent.

As the report notes, surveillance technology is often not covered by state stalking statutes. While some states only require that victims are going through emotional distress or a broad fear for their safety, other states require that victims show the defendant has made them feel terrorized and threatened.

In many situations, there is an even higher standard, which is that a victim is afraid of serious injury or death, or a "reasonable person" standard is used, according to the report.

Karen Fultz, visiting professor at Western Michigan University's Cooley Law School, says that victims can often take legal action and charge abusers with stalking, which leads to obtaining an order of protection.

"You can build a case of that kind if a secret app was downloaded into your system to track communication," Fultz says. "If there is a sense of danger and fear for your safety, it may rise to the level where you can obtain an order of protection."

Fultz gave an example where a husband suspected his wife is putting his safety at risk.

"I think if a spouse has made threats, what the husband would have to do is go to the court, and present evidence of recent events that, in his opinion, places him in fear for his safety," Fultz says.

"Whether it's a comment by way of third parties or evidence of a tracking device, they would have to show it goes beyond conduct consistent with a normal relationship."

If those proceedings were successful, the husband in the example could get a temporary order to remove the threat from the residence, and depending on the jurisdiction, would go back to court in seven to 10 business days so the husband could produce evidence (while his wife is in court) that supports his petition for a protective order.

Assuming he provides sufficient evidence, the order would remain in place for at least six to 12 months, Fultz says.

"It used to be that an order of protection was as good as the paper it was written on," Fultz says. "The difficulty wasn't in getting an order, it was enforcing it. Now the police are taking it more seriously."

The Law Enforcement Response

Although abusers often use social media to harass and intimidate, police are also using social media to their advantage, she says.

"Police are becoming more knowledgeable and resourceful when it comes to social media," adds Fultz. "They will Google someone's Facebook page because some are open to the public and everyone, and you can see the most recent posts and look at their state of mind."

"If the author discloses something on the victim's Facebook page that is interpreted as inappropriate, such as 'I watched you. I saw you at the night club and I was following you home,' the police are looking at that."

An issue for a male abuse victim, such as the one referenced in Fultz' example, however, is that he often needs to provide more evidence, she says. Police often find it difficult to believe a man feels physically intimidated by a woman.

Alexis Moore agrees, saying that although she has seen more men come forward and talk to her about stalking, she finds that men have a steeper hill to climb.

"That's a huge problem: I explain to guys who go to law enforcement that they have to have 10 times more evidence than a female victim," Moore says.

A lot of that has to do with common personality traits of abusers, and of course the abusers tend to be men, so law enforcement authorities are skeptical.

"It's common to have a predator say they're the one being stalked, because many [abusers] have a narcissistic personality disorder," Moore says. "Men need much more documentation. They have to be gentleman. They can't say 'How dare you for not helping me?' or act arrogant."

It's difficult to keep abuse from escalating into assault and homicide when victims are completely unaware of its existence.

Patti Giggans, executive director of Peace Over Violence, says one victim was tracked to a shelter, exposing an otherwise safe place to the abuser.

"We had one victim tracked to a shelter via her phone. She was forced to leave the shelter," Giggans recalled. "We had to destroy the phone (and) get her to a shelter outside of L.A. County to get her off the grid. This can be very serious if someone really wants to come after you."

Melissa Wayment, victim assistance center manager for Your Community Connection in Odgen, Utah, says her center doesn't ask people to leave behind their phones: They want victims to have connections to family.

"It would prohibit survivors from coming in." Wayment explains. "If they can't communicate with family, it secludes them here. We want them to have those avenues [for communication]."

Jacquie Marroquin, of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, says that banning devices would further isolate and disempower survivors.

"Abusers use power and control over their victims, and part of that includes isolation, so I'm all for the use of tech for convenience, to provide connections," Marroquin says. "(Otherwise), it just reinforces what abusers want us to do. "

Casey Quinlan is an editor of the investing section at U.S. News and World Report. She has written for the New York Daily News, City Limits, The Atlantic and Minyanville. She welcomes comments from readers.

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Image by blakespot, via Flickr Alexis Moore knows what it means to be the victim of a cyberstalker. Her ex-boyfriend hacked into her online accounts and her cellphone, and emptied her bank account-an experience that was so traumatic she attempted suicide in 2006.

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Craigslist Killer: Philip Markoff interviewed by Boston Police

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Chapter 7 - Identifying and Arresting Suspects

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Chapter 7 - Identifying and Arresting Suspects

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-Developing, locating, identifying, and arresting suspects

are primary responsibilities of investigators
-In many cases, there is initially no suspect.
-Most crimes are not witnessed

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Hunting a serial killer is, according to experts, a fundamentally different type of detective work than any other type of homicide investigation. For decades the top investigators in this hyper-specialized field have turned to technology. In 2017 this means AI, and just like everything else, it's revolutionizing the industry.

It's impossible to know how many active serial killers there are in the US right now. Due to law enforcement and other government reporting failures, miscategorized evidence, and genuine mystery the best estimate we have is somewhere between 25 and 340. The FBI thinks about 150 people a year are murdered by these predators. Other experts think that number is much higher.

There's a dark future ahead for serial killers, but first machines need to understand what they're dealing with. There's an adage that goes "to catch a killer, you have to think like one" and this is true of computers as much as men.

One academic, in conjunction with The History Channel, is teaching AI to think like a killer by exposing it to all the information available on The Zodiac Killer. As reported by History.com's Brynn Holland and Missy Sullivan:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the self-named murderer terrorized Northern California with a succession of random killings and taunting letters to the police and newspapers. Four of those communiqués contained ciphers filled with perplexing letters and abstract symbols. Cryptologists consider the Zodiac's 340-character cipher, sent to The San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969, a holy grail of sorts.

The AI, named CARMEL, and its creator, Kevin Knight, already have a legacy. They broke a code called the Copiale Cipher, that'd held its secrets unsolved since the 18 th century.

Another fun fact about CARMEL: it's quite the accomplished poet. The machine creates impromptu poetry on demand (and free of charge) on its website. You can check it out here and, as you may have guessed, its work is decidedly creepy.

Solving an old case, however, won't necessarily provide any actionable insight on our current serial killer problem. In order to take the hunt for these very real monsters to the next level, we need to treat the data we have on serial killers as seriously as Facebook treats the data it has on your family.

You probably guessed that this requires AI, and you're correct.

The New Yorker recently profiled Thomas Hargrove and his algorithms. Together, along with several other team members, they comprise the Murder Accountability Project (MAP). The group writes:

America does a poor job tracking and accounting for its unsolved homicides. Every year, at least 5,000 killers get away with murder. The rate at which police clear homicides through arrest has declined over the years until, today, about a third go unsolved.

That's terrifying. However, they're a group with solutions. Thanks to some good old fashioned hardcore investigative journalism and a healthy amount of machine learning insights they've been able to create a map of murder. That may sound macabre, and it absolutely is, but it's also providing the type of pattern based insight that AI is better at gleaning than humans.

In Chicago, right now, the group is concerned there's a serial killer strangling women. Its AI has identified several "suspicious clusters" of murder activity which it reported to the FBI for investigation. While typically these types of deaths might be attributed to gang activity or other types of killings, AI is able to discern specific types of patterns and connect them.

And it's not just Chicago. Hargrove's group has found many clusters all over the country.

On the MAP website users can search through its database of current and historical murder statistics, like a Google Analytics for killings. It appears limited to the US, but otherwise it's a robust tool, and a fine example of how AI can be used for the forces of good.

Even when AI isn't purpose built for tracking serial killers or cracking codes, it still represents a future bright with potential.

Just like oncologists will one day rely on AI to confirm their diagnoses (or even provide them), it'll be imperative that all data gathered at a crime scene be run by an AI that can produce leads or direct investigations.

Agencies are beginning to employ AI, like Veritone's, to sift through video. This is a task that we've had to rely on humans to do traditionally. In a future where thousands of hours of video can be analyzed instantly, our ability to connect the dots between one murder and the next will increase exponentially.

And while, presumably, there will always be twisted humans born with whatever affliction of the mind causes a person to commit atrocity, it's comforting to know that advances in technology are making our world a safer place.

Read next: Bitcoin exchange NiceHash robbed of $64 million from its wallet

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AI is unraveling the mysteries of the serial killer mind

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Hunting a serial killer is, according to experts, a fundamentally different type of detective work than any other type of homicide investigation. For decades the top investigators in this hyper-specialized field have turned to technology. In 2017 this means AI, and just like everything else, it's revolutionizing the industry.

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-Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) spearheads the war on drugs, although local police departments deal with drugs at their level on the streets daily.
-Drugs are widely distributed both by small local gangs and large organized crime factions.

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The Mexican Drug War, launched in December 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderon, is approaching its eight-year mark.

The series of conflicts, which has pitted the Mexican military, cartels, vigilantes, and police forces against one another, has had a profound effect upon Mexico. It killed over 60,000 people between 2006 and 2012 but is far from over: In early October, 43 Mexican students vanished from Iguala, a town about halfway between Mexico City and the Pacific coast. The search for the missing students has so far been unsuccessful, although drug trafficking organizations were almost definitely involved and investigators have discovered freshly dug graves.

The mass kidnapping came at the same time as a couple of high-profile busts. On Oct. 1, Hector Beltran Leyva, leader of an eponymous cartel, was nabbed by the Mexican army in San Miguel de Allende. The head of the Juarez cartel was arrested just days later.

The drug war can be seen as the Mexican state's long-overdue effort to impose order on the country after decades in which the government tolerated or even coddled the cartels' activities. But the war has also pitted the major drug traffickers against each other in excessively violent struggles to maintain, or expand, their positions.

Here are seven of the country's most notorious organizations, and where the last eight years of chaos have left them.

The Sinaloa Cartel

The Sinaloa Cartel is the single largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Western hemisphere.

The Sinaloa is not a single hierarchical organization. Instead, it functions more as a confederacy of groups that are connected through blood, marriage, and regional relationships. Decisions for the group are ultimately made through board-of-directors-type mechanisms and not by a single leader.

This operational flexibility has allowed the Sinaloa to continue to thrive despite several setbacks. In 2008, the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO), once a core component of the cartel, split from the group and began to wage war against it. And earlier this year, Chapo Guzman, the group's multibillionaire architect and a criminal business visionary, was finally arrested in the coastal resort city of Mazatlan.

However, the Sinaloa made new alliances and continued to expand.

Today, the Sinaloa are active in 17 Mexican states and throughout the US. They have connections that stretch to Australia as well.

The Sinaloa's success is allegedly due in part to the organization's history of preferential treatment at the hands of US's Drug Enforcement Administration and the Mexicans, who are accused of using the Sinaloa as a source of information or (even as a hands-off means of enforcement) against other, less pliable cartels.

The Beltran Leyva Organization

The BLO was originally formed by four brothers as part of the Sinaloa Cartel and consisted largely of poppy and marijuana growers. Over time, the BLO changed its modus operandi and became muscle for the Sinaloa against the Gulf Cartel and its former military wing, Los Zetas.

In 2008, the Sinaloa and the BLO violently split. This conflict almost destroyed the BLO, as they were hounded by the Sinaloa and had to deal with arrests of their leadership and in-fighting amongst the upper ranks of of the organization. This weakness led the BLO to form pragmatic alliances with Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, and the Juarez Cartel in an effort to strike back against the Sinaloa.

The BLO is likely on the ropes. In October, Hector Beltran Leyva, the last of the original four BLO brothers, was arrested.

The Juarez Cartel

The Juarez Cartel is one of the oldest surviving drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, with its roots reaching back to the 1980s. The group began its narcotics activities before moving into human trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion.

The wealth of the cartel was largely due to its control of the crucial border city of Juarez, a strategic trafficking corridor into the US.

Originally one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico, it began fighting the Sinaloa in 2004. Ciudad Juarez became the murder capital of the world for three years straight, before the city's drug trade ultimately came under control of the Sinaloa. The loss of the cartel's home city, coupled with an outdated business model, led to the group's decline.

Today, the Juarez Cartel is struggling to maintain its relevance against the Sinaloa. It has aligned itself with the Zetas and the BLO in attempts to win back its former zones of control, although this might prove difficult as the group's suspected leader was arrested in the beginning of October.

The Knights Templar

The Knights Templar are a relatively new group, and were formed in 2010 by Servando Gomez Martinez. Martinez was formerly a high-ranking member of the nearly extinct La Familia Michoacana, but he left the organization after its leader was killed.

As a splinter group of La Familia, the Knights Templar employ similar strategies and trappings. They model themselves as a "self-defense" movement against other cartels on behalf of the indigenous population of Michoacana state. The Knights Templar also made use of ritualistic killings and the dismemberment of rivals in an effort to dissuade resistance.

However, the Knights Templar's brutal methods have backfired. A popular vigilante revolt - sanctioned by the Mexican authorities - effectively pushed the Knights Templar from areas across the state. Rival cartels joined in the effort, eager for a chance to help eliminate one of their rivals.

The Gulf Cartel

The Gulf Cartel, found in the region of eastern Mexico along the Gulf Coast states, started achieving considerable success and infamy in 1984 when it associated with the Colombian Cali Cartel. Once the Gulf had significant funds, it became one of the first cartels to turn into a mega-operation with a dedicated military wing that eventually mutated into Los Zetas, now one of the most violent criminal groups in the western hemisphere.

Ironically, it was the emergence of the Zetas as a separate entity that did the most damage to the once-powerful Gulf. By 2010, the Zetas had broken violently from the Gulf Cartel and was waging an aggressive war for territorial control in the Gulf's home state of Tamaulipas.

Aside from war with the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel also suffered from severe infighting and several high-profile arrests of its top membership during Mexico's Drug War. Despite the setbacks, the Gulf still controls a lucrative smuggling corridor along the US-Mexico border into Texas, and the cartel has entered into alliances with the Sinaloa and the remnants of La Familia Michoacana against the Zetas.

Los Zetas

The organization's origins go back to the late 1990s as the elite private security apparatus of the Gulf Cartel. In an effort to outdo their rivals, the Gulf Cartel formed the Zetas out of a core of at least 31 deserters of the Mexican Special Forces.

The formal military training of the early Zetas, along with their penchant for committing bloody and audacious acts such as beheadings and petrol bomb attacks, have led the DEA and the Mexican authorities to declare the Zetas to be their No. 1 enemy within Mexico.

In 2010, following the arrests and death of Zetas and Gulf Cartel leaders, the Zetas violently split from the Gulf Cartel, of which they had previously served as a military wing. The Zetas followed the split with a string of high-profile attacks against DEA and US immigration agents.

Today, the group has fractured somewhat under joint attacks from the Sinaloa and the Mexican government, but they have spread into Guatemala and diversified their criminal enterprises into child prostitution and oil theft.

The Tijuana Cartel

During its heyday in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Tijuana Cartel, also known as the Arellano Felix, was among the strongest of the organized crime organizations in Mexico. The cartel controlled the lucrative corridor of Tijuana for running drugs and people into the US.

Today, the organization is a shell of what it once was. A series of high profile arrests and assassinations have decapitated the cartel. In 2013, the oldest brother of the family that ran the group was assassinated at a party by a man in a clown costume. Then, in 2013, the cartel's leader was arrested as well, heralding a breakdown in the organization's control.

The sudden vacuum of leadership in Tijuana enabled the Sinaloa Cartel to move in and take control of the border town in a relatively bloodless transition. It is now believed that the remnants of the Tijuana Cartel have been folded under the Sinaloa umbrella.

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Nearly Eight Years Into The Drug War, These Are Mexico's 7 Most Notorious Cartels

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The Mexican Drug War, launched in December 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderon, is approaching its eight-year mark. The series of conflicts, which has pitted the Mexican military, cartels, vigilantes, and police forces against one another, has had a profound effect upon Mexico.

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-Gangs have been around for essentially the entire lifespan of the country
-Despite the illegal activities that gangs partake in, simply being in a gang is not illegal

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Criminal justice agencies use a variety of strategies to combat gang-related crime.

Prevention

Prevention refers to services, programs or activities designed to prevent people from joining gangs. Prevention often focuses on young persons. Situational gang crime prevention focuses more on the situational causes of crime and less on the dispositional traits of specific offenders and often addresses the environmental and opportunistic factors that influence offender decision-making.

Intervention

Intervention seeks to draw gang members and close associates away from the gang lifestyle. Many programs involve law enforcement coordination with community- or faith-based organizations to offer education, job training and community service opportunities as incentives to quit the gang while still holding those receiving services accountable for continued delinquent or criminal activity.

Suppression

Suppression, or gang crime enforcement, encompasses a broad range of criminal justice activities in which law enforcement, prosecution, probation and parole focus their resources to limit and assure accountability for the criminal activity of gangs and gang members. Suppression tactics may include:

Sharing intelligence about gangs (between criminal justice actors such as law enforcement and corrections).

Targeting and apprehending serious and chronic gang crime offenders.

Using gang injunctions or civil ordinances to prevent association among known gang members.

Prosecuting gang offenders using vertical prosecution, enhanced sentencing, and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations and conspiracy statutes.[1]

Learn more about the role of gangs in prosecution.

Assessment

To make anti-gang strategies most successful, an important first step involves conducting an assessment of the problem. An up-front assessment of a problem helps leaders understand the problem in as much detail as possible. The leaders can then focus planning and target their actions on a plan that saves time and money in the long run.

The assessment process generally consists of three steps:[2]

1. Laying the groundwork and identifying people who can oversee the entire process and provide direction for data collection efforts.

2. Collecting data, analyzing and interpreting it using a range of indicators in multiple domains.

3. Preparing reports, findings and final reports that explain in detail the nature and extent of the situation.

Notes

[note 1] Examples of conspiracy statutes brought to bear in gang prosecution include, but are not limited to, 18 U.S.C. § 371 and 21 U.S.C. § 846. "Conspiracy" is an agreement to commit a crime; some conspiracy statutes require overt acts while others do not. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, or RICO, is 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-68.

[note 2] This section adapted from Institute for Intergovernmental Research, OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model: A Guide to Assessing Your Community's Youth Gang Problem, Washington, D.C.:U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2009, pp 4-6. Retrieved December 2, 2010 from http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Content/Documents/Assessment-Guide/Assessment-Guide.pdf.

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Criminal justice agencies use a variety of strategies to combat gang-related crime. Prevention refers to services, programs or activities designed to prevent people from joining gangs. Prevention often focuses on young persons. Situational gang crime prevention focuses more on the situational causes of crime and less on the dispositional traits of specific offenders and often addresses the environmental and opportunistic factors that influence offender decision-making.

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-The Justice Department’s top priority is to support law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the fight against terrorism
-FBI classifies terrorist acts as either domestic or

international

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Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

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Combating Terrorism Center - CTC at West Point

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The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point educates, advises, and conducts research to understand the challenges of terrorism and counterterrorism. Learn more.