Analysis of organized crime and criminal violence has been limited by a lack of high-quality data on key attributes of organized criminal groups, including their origins, structure, where they operate, and their alliances and rivalries with one another. The Mapping Criminal Organizations project (MCO) aims to fill this gap for Mexico and develop methods that can be replicated in other countries.

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Defining and tracking organized criminal groups is an inevitably complex endeavor. MCO therefore combines methods and sources, from hand-coding data to scraping and processing entire archives using machine learning and natural language processing techniques, to collect and organize data at multiple levels. In its current stage, the project is producing five types of data:

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• State-month data on presence (minor, significant, major), all states, based on hand coding.

• Municipality-year data on presence (minor, significant, major), some metropolitan areas, based on hand coding.

• Municipality-year data on presence, all municipalities, based on machine-aided data collection and classification.

• Group histories tracking the origin, composition, and evolution of criminal groups.

• Group dyad data on relationship status (allied, enemy) by period.

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These elements complement each other. A common core of qualitative research and documented decisions identifies a universe of groups and factions to track through time even as they change names, split and merge, and change affiliations. Hand-coded data helps train and validate our algorithm-based datasets. Automated methods help identify sources and priorities for our hand-coded work.

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This project is supported by the Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies at UCSD’s School of  Global Policy and Strategy, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, and the Data-Driven Social Science Initiative at Princeton University. It has also received funding from the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University.

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For access to the complete dataset, methodology, and updates on future releases, please sign up for the Mexico Violence Resource Project mailing list by clicking here.