Intelligence, Risk, and Conservation: Building a Crime Science Approach to Wildlife Crime

This article comes later in the month than usual: Over the past few weeks I have been tied up with my thesis defence. It was the culmination of 4 years of research, writing, and fieldwork. I am pleased, relieved (and with a slightly strange sense of loss) to be able to write that it was successful. So this month, rather than moving straight on to the next analysis, I want to pause slightly and reflect on what brought me here, what I set out to learn, what I found, and where I hope this work will lead.

The seeds of this research were sown in the field. Working alongside rangers and managers, I saw how much effort went into protecting wildlife, and how little clarity there was about whether those efforts actually reduced risk. Patrol kilometres were counted. Arrests were tallied. Seizures were reported. But none of those numbers truly answered the question: are we making this place safer for wildlife?

One moment crystallised the problem for me. I came across a report proudly stating that “no elephants were killed this year.” On the surface, that sounded like success. But I knew patrols had been sparse, intelligence fragmented, and detection patchy. The report claimed certainty where there was none. It was then that I realised the challenge: without better tools to analyse risk and offender behaviour, conservation enforcement was always going to struggle.

Professionally, I had a background in intelligence and security management. Intellectually, I was drawn to the crime science tradition: the study of patterns, opportunities, and prevention. At the same time, I was reading works like Reducing Crime and listening to the accompanying podcast, and I found myself gripped by the clarity of their arguments. When I read Andrew Lemieux and William Moreto’s works on wildlife crime, I began to see the gaps: here was a rich toolkit from criminology and policing, full of methods designed to understand and reduce crime, yet so little of it was being applied in the areas in which I was working. That convergence of frustration and possibility - experience in the field on one hand, and the untapped potential of crime science on the other - led me to the professional doctorate.

A professional doctorate differs from a traditional PhD. Where a PhD is usually about developing new theory, a professional doctorate is designed to bridge scholarship and practice. It takes problems rooted in the field, subjects them to rigorous analysis, and produces insights that are directly applicable to those working on the ground. For me, that meant drawing on criminology to re-imagine how conservation could understand and reduce wildlife crime, and testing those ideas in the very landscapes where the problems are most acute.

My research asked: how can intelligence and crime science methods be applied to prevent wildlife crime?

The core questions were:

• How do offenders actually decide where, when, and how to hunt illegally?

• What weaknesses in site security and enforcement structures sustain opportunities for crime?

• How can insights from offender decision-making be integrated into the intelligence cycle for wildlife crime policing?

These questions matter because wildlife crime prevention has too often been reduced to two narrow lenses: offender “motivations,” or simplistic enforcement outputs. My aim was to shift the focus towards opportunity structures, behaviour, and risk, in order to provide conservation with a more scientific basis for prevention.

I worked with data rarely brought into conservation research: the voices of offenders themselves. More than three hundred incarcerated wildlife crime offenders completed semi-structured questionnaires. Their perspectives were supplemented by a further set of questionnaires completed by protected area managers and law enforcement practitioners, providing a crucial comparison between those committing crime and those tasked with preventing it.

It was not without challenge. Access to prisons required careful negotiation. Data protection and ethics demanded rigorous management. And the findings often pushed against long-held assumptions about enforcement, which demands a re-examination of what actually works. None of this would have been possible without the partnership and support of WCP, whose groundwork and collaboration were central throughout.

The research produced several clear findings:

• Awareness of the law does not equal compliance. Most offenders knew their actions were illegal, but this did little to shape behaviour. Legitimacy of the law remained weak, and social disapproval of poaching was often absent.

• Certainty of capture matters more than severity of punishment. Echoing deterrence theory, the fact that most offenders knew their actions were illegal but went ahead anyway indicates that the risk of being caught shaped their choices far more than the threat of long prison sentences.

• Opportunity is the primary driver. Decisions were shaped less by broad “motivation” (e.g. poverty) than by opportunity structures: access to animals, environmental cover, distance to travel, and relationships with other offenders

• Routine and learning create predictable patterns. Offenders relied on what they had learned and the places they knew. These “awareness spaces” meant behaviour followed routines that could, in principle, be anticipated and disrupted.

• Seasonality and environment shape behaviour. Terrain, vegetation, and the farming cycle strongly influenced when and where hunting occurred. These factors could be modelled for risk prediction.

• Covert tactics need caution. Methods such as inducement can distort crime data and erode trust. The research argues they should be applied surgically, not routinely.

• Current intelligence use is reactive and limited. Reliance on informants and output-based metrics obscured opportunities to integrate offender decision-making.

• This led me to coin Poacher Decision-Making Intelligence (PODMINT) as a structured way to embed offender knowledge into the intelligence cycle.

The most striking surprise was how strongly offender perspectives aligned with established criminological theory. What might look like “chaotic” bushmeat hunting followed clear, patterned routines that mirrored crime pattern theory and could be integrated into preventive policing.

For conservation managers, the research shows that patrols can be smarter and more effective when risk is understood spatially and temporally. For policymakers and funders, it provides an alternative to misleading metrics: success measured not in arrests but in reduced risk. For researchers, it highlights the value of interdisciplinary borrowing — criminology and conservation have much to teach each other. And for communities, it points to systems that address the root opportunities for crime rather than perpetually reacting to symptoms.

This is not just theory. I am already developing training modules to help rangers and managers apply these methods in practice. The aim is to embed risk-based thinking into conservation enforcement, shifting it from routine patrols to prevention strategies. It is about helping those on the ground make better-informed decisions with the data they already collect.

Mixed feelings now - I have been (and still am) slightly obsessed with the subject so my apologies to friends and family who have had to listen to me talk about little else for the past few years - that’s probably not going to stop.

Looking ahead, I plan to continue developing consultancy and training work through Conservation Risk Analytics. I am piloting risk-based patrol planning modules with partners in southern Africa. I am working on frameworks to help protected areas measure performance in ways that matter. And I am seeking collaboration with NGOs, governments, funders, and researchers, who are interested in building a more scientific foundation for wildlife crime prevention and who want to take research further and start empirically testing things like Risk Terrain Modelling in a conservation context.

So for the first time (which feels strange, but undeniably satisfying) I am signing off as Dr.

I know it may be a little gauche to lean on the title too much just yet, but I hope I can beg your indulgence and a bit of leeway while I enjoy it for a while.

Emma Richards (DCrimJ)

With thanks to my supervisor, Dr Nick Pamment, and my examiners, Prof. Paul Smith and Dr Andrew Lemieux for their guidance, rigour, and generosity throughout this process.