The rationale for writing this book is a desire to highlight the utility of combining the efforts of criminologists, security practitioners, and policy makers in confronting crime problems such as maritime piracy. The study examines maritime piracy incident trends over the past few years and presents an explanation for the significant reduction of incidents in East Africa and offers a new approach in constructing a crime-reducing framework applicable to piracy, as well as other crime problems. The intent is to add relevance to the pursuit of social science research crime data collection and analysis using criminological theories (frameworks) and planning techniques for developing crime interdiction strategies that are useful to security practitioners and policy makers.

Emphasis is on obtaining readily available data using recognized social science methods to analyze the maritime piracy crime phenomenon for planning and developing the strategies and actions that produce desired outcomes in support of crime reduction. This approach involves identifying appropriate tasks or actions to be taken to achieve the desired effects for each objective and subobjective. It includes an evaluation process of the most salient variables in order to produce assessments that will focus on measuring those actions that have the greatest impacts for generating the most favorable conditions in the environment (desired effects) that are conducive to achieving supporting subobjectives and overall objective (i.e., maritime piracy reduction). This approach creates a framework using selected crime theory elements for examining quantitative and qualitative data for planning counterpiracy actions through a dynamic planning and assessment process.