Offender Profiling Series
Profiling
Property Crimes
Edited by David Canter & Laurence Alison (2000)
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Property Crimes
Profiling Property Crimes
Adrian Robertson
Theft at Work
This chapter positions crime at work as presenting
a set of investigative problems that are similar to those of 'public'
crime, although there may be a narrower range of behavioural or crime
scene clues. Studies using survey and content analysis of archives, do
however, support the general Investigative Psychology hypothesis that
across a sample of offenders, there will be systematic co-variance between
characteristics of the offender and characteristics of the offence. By
extrapolating these co-variances, the resources available to the detective
can be enhanced, and more importantly, criminal behaviour at work can
be perceived as a systems phenomenon. This offers the possibility of cross-organisational
crime prevention strategies where crime can be designed out by greater
sensitivity to the risks that individuals may present when they find themselves
in tempting environments. By viewing crime as a sub-system of the organisation,
and by seeing employee crime as an accumulating developmental path of
deviance, intervention methods which are more discerning, more long term,
and behaviourally based than those based on physical security alone are
suggested.
Adrian Robertson has over ten years' experience as a police officer and a company detective. He has a particular interest in behavioural and system dimensions of employee crime, and is a graduate of the MSc course in Investigative Psychology at the University of Surrey. He now works as an internal consultant within a major UK Corporation, where he has continued to develop a wider systemic perspective on workplace deviancy and performance failure, focusing on deviant activities as an essential part of building diagnostic evidence in quality improvement programmes. More recently he has begun to look at the possibility of working on employee crime at a cultural level, creating a spirit of participation and inquiry around preventing failure and peer challenge of inappropriate workplace behaviours. Adrian believes that most companies could adopt much more sophisticated approaches to tackling employee crime, and that in general, company detectives and managers have a limited view of the problem. This in turn, hampers their capacity to deal with the problem in ways which are systematic, engage the genuine support of a workforce, and will have a lasting rather than a temporary effect. He currently works in a virtual team, and has recently explored ways in which deviancy may be permitted and sustained in virtual workplaces.
