The Use of Predictive Policing Models to Counter Extortion

Extorsion is one of the most notorious criminal activities of the different mafias whose negative influence does not only pollute the legal economy, but it also erodes the trust of the social fabric toward justice, the law enforcement and generally toward the state. It mortifies the economic and productive system, the exercise of individual freedoms and the possibility to plan investments throughout the vast territories of the country. The use of extorsion practices on behalf of the mafia has changed over time. The original predatory practice assumes an increasingly marginal character in favor of an entrepreneurial one that allows the broadening of the expansionist aims of the mafia consortia from the original territories to new settlements, both national and international. Faced with the ambivalent fact that the extortion activity and the increasingly profitable aid that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides in the conception of prediction models for the analysis of criminal phenomena, recent research has experimented with a model to complement the already existing anti-mafia legislation of preventative nature as a tool to enhance the efficiency of the measures to contest the extortion activity through the adoption of a risk estimation model.