Illegal waste management activity and guardian scripting

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