Julia Shaw

And the answer is also very different potentially than in other kinds of crime that are more commonly discussed, like violent crime.

So initially, when I started trying to apply criminal psychology to these really big crimes that are often also multilevel, where you've got bosses, whether it's a corporate boss or an illegal gang boss,

You've got the middlemen.

You've got the people on the ground who actually have the guns who are killing people or animals or are logging or polluting.

And then you've got sort of all these levels of people.

And that makes it very different from the kinds of crimes that we often talk about in other kinds of true crime, for example, where it's sort of one person, maybe a couple of people against one other person or a couple of other people.

And so the scale is so tiny normally.

And it's mostly violent crime, which is mostly it's arguments, it's bad decisions.

It's people who are frankly often quite vulnerable themselves, like substance using, people with mental health problems, people who are sleeping rough.

These are not healthy, normal people most of the time who are perpetrating bad crimes.

And yet in this context, in environmental crime, this is where I couldn't apply the research directly.

You've got some of the smartest people in the world who are still engaging in fraud, who are engaging in the cover-up of financial information, who are creating shell companies in order to hide certain things for poaching, the proceeds of poaching.

You've got people who are out there illegally fishing, and someone's insuring the vessel that has been literally registered by Interpol as a criminal vessel for 10 years, and someone's going, I'll insure that.

And so you've got these really...

complicated other factors going on.

But I thought that's what was so interesting is ultimately stripping back each layer of each of these crimes and going, who is that person?

Who is the person who's ensuring this?

Who is the person who is out there engaging in illegal fishing on the boat?

Who is the person who's financing the boat?

Who is the person who's investigating, right?