Art crime and prevention: best practices

What steps can be taken to protect the Australian art market from both theft and fraud? A number of possible answers to this question can be suggested from the viewpoint of a criminologist. Considerable thinking has been done about the issue of crime prevention within criminological theory, and certain aspects of these approaches are potentially helpful in terms of application to the art market. One stream of such thought has highlighted three components that might be considered in addressing the problem of crime and its prevention: (1) the pool of potential motivated offenders; (2) the nature of the opportunities for such crime, in the present case those opportunities referring not just to the gaining access to goods, but as well the access to a market for the disposal of illegal art; and (3) the presence of “capable guardians”, that is, individuals who have the position and capacity to prevent the criminal behaviour from occurring.