Quality assurance in crime scripting

Abstract

With the growing interest in the use of crime scripts and attack scenarios for the development of control measures comes the need for more systematic scripting methods. Information about those sequences of actions that offenders carry out to commit a given type of crime can be extremely valuable to designers as control measures may be designed to influence the possibility to actualise criminal plans. However, there exists limited guidance as to what qualities crime scripts should possess in order to support the creation of suitable requirements, and how they should be handled in a design framework. This theoretical work contributes to the production and sharing of scientifically robust, useful and usable crime scripts. Drawing a link with the main application considered in this paper, it details the ways in which scripts can contribute to the development of functional requirements for control measures. It presents a list of defects commonly encountered with requirements specifications, and identifies those that could originate from poorly constructed scripts. This section adopts a modelling approach to identify and discuss the sought qualities of crime scripts, but the results apply to all scripts developed for the purpose of reducing crime. The author presents a list of twelve quality criteria that could be used to evaluate crime scripts. These were identified by considering the common defects of requirements specifications, and tracing back their potential causes within crime scripts. The criteria relate to the following modelling aspects: typology, traceability, transparency, consistency, context, completeness, parsimony, precision, uncertainty, usability, ambiguity and accuracy. A checklist is also provided to facilitate comparison between scripts, contribute to their utility, and ensure that the information required by designers of security systems is available within the functional requirements to be developed for innovative designs. Ultimately, this first investigation of quality assurance in crime scripting opens an important avenue towards further research on the construction and evaluation of crime scripts, their verification and validation.