Body Switching and Related Adaptations in the Resale of Stolen Vehicles. Script Elaborations and Aggregate Crime Learning Curves

The paper provides a case study of a sustained crime expansion. The case study is offence-specific (motor vehicles stolen for resale purposes) and restricted to a particular time frame (1974-92) and setting (a Canadian province). 'How' offenders have collectively designed this crime increase is given a salient analytical status and made to explain 'why' it occurred in the first place. As suggested by Cornish (1994) crimes can be analysed as behavioural scripts of various complexity, and offending activities as the purposive experimentation and tinkering of such scripts. Our main argument is that multiple innovations or script alterations have been successfully introduced and adopted by a significant mix of motivated and suitable participants, producing over time a cumulative or sustaining effect on yearly output of unrecovered stolen vehicles. In order to document this 'aggregate learning' process we rely on a subset of police investigations on resale networks.