Changes in the procedures and techniques used to conduct crimes with a profit motive and different offenders, possibly recruited from a broader spectrum of society, can be anticipated. The use of technology will alter investigation, detection, and preventive methods. Transnational crime has more opportunities due to national laws, regulations, and taxation variations. However, these will not change fundamentally; just the specific goods and services, routes, and target markets will. The most significant difference in predatory crimes will be additional opportunities to carry out conventional forms of fraud using more contemporary communication techniques.
There is little reason to believe that the current trend toward declining violent crime rates will reverse, barring some socioeconomic calamity or significant demographic upheaval. Services that gather, share and analyze volunteered genetic information have emerged due to recent developments in DNA technology and businesses that offer array-based testing (Erlich et al., 2018). Privacy issues have been raised mainly because law enforcement uses these services to identify suspects in criminal investigations. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that crimes will endanger society or the legal economy any more than they already have. It is reasonable to anticipate that the primary types of profit-driven crimes will not change: theft, extortion, financial and commercial fraud, and trafficking in illegal products and services. The total offenses may be the same, but there will be three different significant deviations.
Many technical advancements can make crimes easier to commit by making detection more challenging and permitting more iterations in a shorter time. For instance, call-forwarding can be used in telephone-based fraud schemes, from selling equities and commodities to credit card scams. According to Brayne, the police increasingly rely on big data and automated algorithms to determine who, when, and where to police in addition to using data during investigations (2020). Although these are issues of degree more than kind, specific scams are predicated on false information that can be spread more quickly and widely. Technology may make it easier to commit crimes, but it also makes it easier to be watched and caught. Crime control is not just a technical endeavor; it is frequently influenced by political ideologies and tactics (Shaftoe, 2017). However, blaming national and international politics for all crime-related issues is unhelpful to those who suffer from the consequences of crime and devalues the real progress that can be made locally. The final result cannot be predicted; each situation must be examined individually.
References
Brayne, S. (2020). Predict and surveil: Data, discretion, and the future of policing. Oxford University Press, USA.
Erlich, Y., Shor, T., Pe’er, I., & Carmi, S. (2018). Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches. Science, 362(6415), 690-694. Web.
Shaftoe, H. (2017). Crime prevention: Facts, fallacies, and the future. Bloomsbury Publishing.