Illegal waste management activity and guardian scripting

A rather new development in the crime scripting literature is
Leclerc and Reynald’s (2017) indication that using the script tool
to unpack the actions of actors that participate in crime events
other than offenders would be a desirable next step in the evolution
of CSA (see also Leclerc 2014; 2017). Given the roots of CSA in
environmental criminology, these actors are, most frequently,
victims and guardians as they are conceptualized in routine
activity theory, specifically in the crime triangle devised by Felson
(1986). This contribution welcomes and builds on the suggestion
that the script tool should be applied to the interventions of
guardians. It expands on the indications made by Leclerc and
Reynald in 2017 in three ways: first, the guardian script devised
here draws on data of police authorities whereas Leclerc and
Reynald had initially scripted a by-stander’s intervention
(however, police have already been scripted in Blais and Leclerc
(2023) and Sytsma et al. (2021). Second, the type of criminal
activity that is being intervened upon is fraud as part of routinised,
corporate environmental crimes. The original proposal centered on
a mugging. Third, the guardian script is the second in a two-stage
analysis of a single crime phenomenon. The offender perspective
is gaged by applying CSA in the first stage. In fact, two sets of
findings will be shared: the first set is yielded from a more
“traditional” application of CSA to two crime events involving
fraudulent handling of waste oils. The second set is about a police
team, which investigated those crime events. The guardian script
also dissects the police’s involvement (in collaboration with other
state authorities) in systematic monitoring and enforcement
activities in the industrial sectors in the context of which the crime
events took place.