The Global Organized Crime Index website

To visualize the results of the Global Organized Crime Index, sort and compare the scores, investigate correlations and allow users to explore the data, a dedicated website – ocindex.net – was created for the launch of the first iteration of the tool. The 2023 version of the website offers users an updated platform featuring new functionalities and an improved user experience.

By exploring the Index and its functionalities, users are able to compare data geographically, substantively and – for the first time with this year’s edition – temporally, enabling them to identify trends over space and time.

As with the previous platform, the homepage features a criminality heatmap, which allows users to visualize the scores for the 15 criminal markets, five criminal actor types and 12 resilience indicators, in addition to the aggregate component and sub-component scores. By hovering over a country on the heatmap, an overview of its scores, both aggregated and disaggregated, comes up. In addition, the website allows for comparison of heatmaps for Index indicators across all components of the tool. Thematic and geographic sections are also available on the website, focusing on each criminality and resilience indicator, and each continental subregion, to allow for side-by-side comparisons of regions and thematic areas.

Under the criminality and resilience components, countries are ranked by their scores, allowing users the option for comparative analysis. Rankings are not meant to judge or merely identify the best- and worst-performing countries, but to start a conversation among policymakers and regional bodies, encouraging them to explore how and why organized crime affects their countries, and learn from one another in order to develop effective resilience strategies for specific contexts.

In addition to the scores and rankings, the Index website has maintained and updated its ‘country summaries’ section, allowing users to explore the narratives that underpin countries’ scores. The summaries provide the background context for each country’s criminality and resilience indicators, and illustrate key trends.

In the data explorer section, users can make their own comparisons by viewing the Index’s scores in relation to one another as well as to external indicators and other indices. The Index offers an overarching and holistic framework of a country’s overall relationship to organized crime. At the same time, its subcomponents and indicators allow users to disaggregate such information and determine correlations with various impact areas in any given country or region.

New features: improved user experience

As mentioned, users are now able to make longitudinal comparisons using historical data from the previous iteration of the Index. Besides that analytical capability, other features have been introduced to improve the overall user experience:

• Short definitions of criminal markets, actor types and resilience indicators have been included, which pop up when users hover over an indicator (i.e. heatmaps, country pages, rankings, etc.). For the full definitions, users can refer to ‘Expanded definitions and guiding questions’ in the ‘Downloads’ section.
• The ‘About’ section has been expanded to include all the analysis and dissemination activities, such as blogs, podcasts, papers on measuring different organized crime markets and events, that have been envisioned and realized to showcase the Index results.
• A survey for users to complete evaluating their experience and level of engagement with the Index has been created (see the ‘Feedback’ section). This has been introduced to learn how the Index is used and what can be improved to help us provide the best possible experience.