Crime Waves: Getting Away With Murder on the High Seas

In an article for the The Herald, Ian Urbina revisits a murder that took place in the Indian Ocean in 2012. Beyond this specific incident, the article discusses the difficulty of making maritime crime data publically available. Jon Huggins, senior adviser to One Earth Future's Stable Seas program, shares in the article that available data includes a variety of crimes: robbers siphoning fuel, hijackings, human trafficking, piracy, but, when program officials tried to convince the groups that gathered the data to make it available to the public, Huggins said, they pushed back. Risk-management companies asked why they should share data they could sell instead. Coastal states worried it might scare away business. Flag registries were reluctant to release information that might oblige them to act, which they had little motivation or ability to do.