The dream team: combining social network analysis and expert insights to disrupt Irish criminal networks

Local criminal networks recruit young people and can impact their criminal trajectories, making effective prevention an emerging policy concern. Social network analysis reveals insights and structural reasoning through depiction of networks as well as measurements to describe them. The goal is using social network analysis to provide evidence-based knowledge that informs a decision-making approach for network interventions. Our analysis examines five local crime networks in Ireland. The data was gathered through interviews with local police force from five sub-districts. We utilise network measures, including betweenness centrality, to identify recruiters of young people in networks. To account for noisy, incomplete data, we provide a tool that informs the robustness of our results and supports the decision-making for interventions. We combine the quantitative results with qualitative, expert knowledge to form a ‘dream team’, capable of identifying overall patterns at the network level but also examining individual narratives of key actors and relationships.