One wonders about the future when Gangs could be leveraging big data and machine learning to track police and predict where they will raid. "Predictive policing" indeed.
In Albania, "police" and "gangs" can be 2 groups with a lot of shared interests. A large portion of the economy is fueled from criminal activity abroad, all across Europe. It also finances the state to a large extent.
In some ways, you could consider Uber to be a criminal organization. They were pretty much an illegal Taxi service that grew so fast that no one could stand against them for long. I wonder how many gangs are just small scale Uber operations. Providing a service that is in demand, but legally grey/black and resorting to bribery, coercion, and violent means to protect their interests.
How many new grey market criminal organizations will we call disruptive instead of criminal? What will happen when criminal organizations will be able to get rounds of investment, the same as any legal organization? With major corporations intentionally violating the law as a "cost of business" what is the line between criminal and legitimate organizations?
Depending on which country you are in, I think that's a distinct possibility. In the USA they will probably just use legal means to SLAPP anyone they don't like. But in other countries...
In countries like Russia, China, India, etc you need to hire these kinds of Oligarchs and Lobbyists to operate. Otherwise bad things happen.
Look at Amazon India for example - Prime Video India basically shut down for a year due to the Tandav scandal and Amazon Delivery Trucks in Bangalore were burnt because they pissed off the Small Business/Pharmacy lobby in KA. And they were publically humiliated before all this by the Minister of Commerce in 2019.
This was a big reason Uber divested out of China and ASEAN - they started stepping on entrenched players toes and had no political cover. In the US, the worst that would happen is corporate litigation with an out of court settlment or speeches by local politicians. Not in developing countries.
Weaponized litigation like SLAAP is of course being abused, but as a business operating in the developed world, the rule of law still holds. You won't mysteriously have the IRS or FBI start auditing every single of your transcations, see your trucks or stores burned down, be held PERSONALLY liable, or even mysteriously get shot while leaving court.
I'm curious, what is it about Albanian society that has created such notorious criminal enterprised, compared to, say, neighboring countries, like Greece, former Yugoslavian states, Bulgaria, etc.?
An existing clan structure and the collapse of the Albanian state in the 90s leading to intergenerational trauma among the diaspora.
Also, a lot of ethnic Albanians in the diaspora are from Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia so they are survivors or the children of survivors from the Yugoslav Civil War.
You see similar issues and dynamics among Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto and Australia, Vietnamese gangs in the Bay Area in the 90s and 2000s, Punjabi Gangs in BC in the 90s and 2000s, Algerians in France/Belgium/Netherlands, Kurds from Turkey in France/Sweden/Germany, and Central American gangs like MS-13 across California - all are the children of survivors or survivors from very brutal civil wars dropped into impoverished neighborhoods with locals who were antagonistic to these refugees. Because these survivors had existing community structures and occasionally actual combat experience, they could organize and fight back.
Add to that a lot of the players in the conflicts in the old country ended up converting their militias or organizations into Organized Crime to continue funding the "good fight" in the old country.
Also, other Balkan diasporas have similar issues like the Albanians. Serbian organized crime is a player in NYC, Chicago, Australia, and Germany for example.
Here in Germany, as you say, both Serbian and Albanian gangs are highly successful. To add to your points, both communities are very tightly knit, and it is not uncommon for an Albanian to have family all around the country. This created a kind of a "virtuous" circle where gangs had connections all around the country, and criminal enterprise was by far the most lucrative choice of career.
You've mentioned many examples already, but another on would be Lebanese people who fled the civil war to Europe, and went on to create some of the most powerful criminal organizations in Germany and neighboring countries.
Yep! Pretty much this! Even I've leveraged old world clan networks professionally (helps to get introduced to VCs, Execs, and Politicians in US, Canada, Australia, and the UK). For some reason, Western Europeans, Canadians, and Americans don't have these kinds of tightly knit networks anymore, but hey, us immigrants and children of immigrants need some kind of upper hand when trying to eck out a new life.
A similar story is happening in Netherlands+Belgium with the Mocro Maffia - a big reason they were able to be successful in the XTC game was because Moroccan Jews are a big player in XTC manufacturing in Israel and there was a diaspora of both Muslim and Jewish Moroccans in Belgium, Netherlands, and France that organized crime groups were able to leverage.
And like you said about the Lebanese, same story with a subset of the Shia Lebanese diaspora in South America (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia) helping enable Hezbollah.
In the 90s, Bulgaria was just like Albania but things got dramatically better once Bulgaria got on the NATO and EU path. That said, Bulgaria is still not on par with the the west and a lot of criminal activity is still going on(not that the west doesn't have criminals but in general Eastern Europe is much worse).
I think the difference in these countries can be attributed to Orthodox Christianity and the rather strong extended-family bonds.
For example, post-communist Bulgaria still has a corruption problem to this day, but its nature is rather different. The former communist state security had a monopoly on all illegal activities during the 1990s. Street gangs of “mutras” were allowed to roam the streets, steal cars, racketeer small family businesses for “insurance services”, but were never allowed to touch anyone’s child, to force someone into human trafficking or to engage in their own illegal foreign schemes without the full knowledge of the state. State security had all the information about former smuggling routes and the gangs were used solely for “doing a job” with a higher risk-rate.
Drug gangs have used devices to detect raids by detecting poor opsec (Bluetooth, etc). As this tech gets easier, it’s easier to build surveillance networks.
No doubt there are significant netowkrs of surveillance all over!
Automation thru better tech infrastructure is key. Moles keep asking for more benefits, like insurance, improved health coverage, increasing travel expense and so on. Money is not raining on anyone including gangs where any service price can be paid, no question asked.
That always carries the risk of leaving a trail somewhere or getting set up by a sting operation. Tech, assuming it's reasonably well secured (and tamper proof is ever easier and easier to achieve), doesn't.
A lot of poor, majority black and brown, neighborhoods have community organized "cop watches". They usually play a role similar to what the Black Panthers did. Just show up when a cop pulls someone over and sit there and watch (and nowadays, record) just to let them know the public's eye is on them
It'd be amazing to see surveillance capitalism turned against itself like this
I keep wondering when citizen ALPR will start augmenting some of these roles.
I don't know if it's universal, but here government-owned vehicles always have an X in the license plate, so you wouldn't even need a database, just alert on any X-plate entering the neighborhood.
Could detect strobing lights with the same cameras, and summon the Watchers automatically.
At some point we will need this to protect from the police. The way they are legislating in Spain lately is atrocious and the priorities do not respond to citizens demands at all.
Automation might be viable in some places in the Americas where cartels effectivley have full control over a region, or for anyone else in a sufficiently remote region who wants to achieve something simialr. Everywhere else you would want to choose your targets carefully. It's easier for police to turn a blind eye if you don't appear to be waging war against them.
Thats were you wrong, that a faction has to be defined to wage a war. Its just another city were some unknown party carried solar charged boxes on the roof, that dislodge drones on siren sound or whatever. The idea, that there is a "war" declaration or even somebody there, is part of the past.
You could hire gig workers to place the dronepackages a "pr" gag allover town. There is not a need for flags, territory or other outdated concepts. Just attrition and correlation.. of wear and tear on civilization
"There is not a need for flags, territory or other outdated concepts."
Any conflict has reasons behind it, as it is just another enterprise that consumes resources for expected rewards. Given the practical needs to manage the said consumed resources, even in guerilla style warfare the conflicts have to have limits (i.e. be contained to a territory). The territory, which these conflicts are waged on, can be and is sooner or later linked to (at least suspected) interested parties. The flags are basically just means to identify a given interested party once it grows past the Dunbar’s number. I do not say that there aren't concepts out there that have little to no practical use (say, an anthem, or a motto), I'm just saying that your list outdated concepts were not good examples.
The reason being that non-state actors, who want to become state actors thrive in a chaotic environment. Coporations and non suit wearing gangsters who can rely on there own power monopolies as long as they are unchallenged by the state, might push such a environment via third parties, to be "left alone".
Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to see what sort of practices make their way back from Ukraine.
It will be interesting to see the police response to the next abusive cop put paid leave being killed or maimed by a drone released by vigilantes.
How about a scenario where police officers are sousveilled by large, anonymous groups to build datasets that can be used to apply pressure to law enforcement and their union groups when they attempt to take more power by demanding larger police budgets.