Developing the Crime Risk Assessment Mechanism

Project MARC aims at developing a crime risk assessment mechanism to proof legislation against crime at a European Union level, the purpose being to explain and quantify the risk of unintended criminal implications/consequences produced by legislation. During the activities the mechanism has been improved and revised. This article describes these developments: it focuses on the legislative crime risk formula and shows the work in progress over a period of 16 months (June 2004 October 2005): from development of the initial methodology until the mechanism was approved by the partners at the last meeting (held in Paris on 27 28 October 2005). It reports all the changes made and the main issues addressed in finalizing the mechanism. The last section of the article presents the most recent version of the MARC formula, which expresses the legislative crime risk index as a function of three variables: the legislative quality index, the market vulnerability index and the seriousness index. It has been constructed as a flexible mechanism that can be used for a variety of applications.