Thursday, August 22, 2013 -
2013 ARCA Annual Art And Heritage Conference,Amsterdam,Ruth Godthelp
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2013 ARCA Art & Cultural Heritage Conference: Dutch Police Officer Ruth Godthelp Presented "The nature of crimes against Arts, Antiques and Cultural Heritage: A description of art-related crime in the Netherlands based on police registrations"
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor
Criminology doctoral candidate and Senior Amsterdam Police Officer (at
the serious and organized crime department at the Amsterdam Police in The
Netherlands), Ruth Godthelp looked at more than 4,000 police reports to study
art crime in The Netherlands in her presentation "The nature of crimes
against Arts, Antiques and Cultural Heritage: A description of art related
crime in the Netherlands based on police registrations" at ARCA's Art
& Cultural Heritage Conference on June 22, 2013.
After a legal career as both a judicial assistant of the Public
Prosecutor and as a lawyer, Ms. Godthelp joined the police and became the first
official national police officer combating art-related crime. She recently
started a PhD in Criminology (VU University Amsterdam) purely based on police
registrations to purify the basic discussion about the actual scope and nature
of art-related crime in the Netherlands.
Although the last decade art-related
crime acquired increased attention within the policing and academic field, a
description of the phenomenon is often made based on theoretical possibilities
and only a few case studies. The question therefore arises whether these
limited sources of information give an accurate reproduction of the actual
nature and scope of art-related crime. This presentation presents provisional
outcomes of an ongoing research project uniquely using police registrations of
art-related crime in the Netherlands from 2007 through 2012 and aims to provide
more insight into the offense itself (1) the suspect (2) and (3) the victims of
art-related crime.
For this study 4,000 registered
art-related crimes were extracted from the Dutch national police database and
submitted to set definitions and operational approaches which narrowed the
dataset down to 1,100 registrations. These were analyzed from the
aforementioned angles (offense, suspect and victim).
A first finding showed that a large
number of registrations were registered in such a restricted way that, although
valuable art, antiques or (international) cultural heritage were involved, any
indication regarding further investigation was lacking, which led to limited
useful information. Further, the paper discusses the type of offense occurring
in the dataset. It showed us mainly (targeted) burglaries from private houses,
involving quite a share of modern art-objects. But also cases with
constructions of money laundering within the commercial world of art, museum
thefts, illegal import of cultural heritage, fraud and high quality forgeries
and recurring suspects are discussed.
Although research based purely on
police-registrations also has restraints (such as the effects of black number
and priority based information) this innovative survey offers the possibility
to purify the basic discussion about the actual scope and nature of art-related
crime. In addition it could serve as a starting-point for further required
empirical research and priority setting within law enforcement.
"The characteristics of the majority of suspects in art-related
crimes in the survey were male, average age of 40-45 years old, and 30% were
employed in the art market," Ms. Godthelp told the audience. "In one
case, two paintings stolen from a private residence changed hands three times
and all three dealers admitted that they didn't verify provenance but trusted
the person they had bought the painting from. This shows how the painting moves
to the licit art market."
In addition, the cases involved people known to the police and selling
art for financial gain. "Three-quarters of the cases, from theft to
recovery, operated within 100 kilometers," Ms. Godthelp said. "The
majority of the motives appeared to be financial -- and in some cases -- that
the art was stolen to sell for cash or for drugs. Sixty percent of the suspects
had police records, including art dealers with multiple records."