Just about everyone seems to make that mistake, not realizing what it causes. I've mentioned it now in the Player's Guide.
Ok, so my strategic analysis of your game:
1) You've had a little bad luck pretty quickly here to get as many criminals as you have. Perhaps some exiles from elsewhere have infested you when you weren't prepared for their approach. But primarily it looks like you may have adopted Banditry before you could manage it or that due to other tactical errors you ended up not being able to manage it later. Thieves are capable of spawning right now because of non-state run theives hideouts that have popped up due to high crime in your second and third cities.
2) You have 2 Lurking Criminals in An Port Mar and 3 in Cuan Donn.
3) Primarily it looks like you've made two core strategic errors that have led to this crime inspired national implosion. You have expanded too fast for your economy and when you did expand, you did not send a Law Enforcement unit along with the settler (that last point is something I do need to teach the AI to do still.) You have 3 cities before the game expects you to even have to manage more than one so you're going to be dealing with some unusual penalties. I suppose you probably managed to do this by getting some free settlers from goody huts right? Beware of these as they can introduce these kind of early management hell scenarios. Given you got these, you would have benefitted to have avoided going for Theft for a while so as to delay opening up the threat of the Thieve's Hideout (Unsanctioned) which emerges in any city over 100 crime when you have the Theft tech.
4)However, not all is lost, though it's going to get worse before it gets better. This truly is a nasty strike scenario. But you aren't going to solve it by building meagre wealth in all your cities when the amount of gold they provide is not going to stave off your strike. Instead, admit to yourself you're going to lose all your units. That's a given. Don't try to do what the AI tries to do in this sort of case and build a bunch of LE units or defenders to try to compensate for its needs when you won't be able to support them anyhow. Instead, understand that this strike cannot stop you from developing your cities by constructing buildings. Obviously, one of the first things you need to develop is crime control buildings but you need to first get yourself to the point where you can build them quickly.
5)So the first thing to do immediately is (and this is going to put you in a race against time before some random barbarian or neanderthal comes in for an attack against your unprotected cities) build the cheapest production producing buildings first and foremost so you can pop out everything else much faster thereafter. No amount of crime impedes your city production until it causes your happiness to collapse and your workers to stop working. So do everything you can to keep your high population capital from imploding. Keep it in the negative on crime or you're really going to be in trouble. My point is, even though you want to get all production benefits first there, you don't want to do so blindly... monitor it and build an anti crime buildng in there if you can or an Enforcer if you can manage it if crime starts creeping in. You may even benefit from switching OFF the Banditry civic immediately until you're back on top of your crime nationwide.
6)Once your secondary cities have built all available (or at least available cheap) production producing buildings, start immediately working on building anti-crime buildings. You also want as much gold producing buildings for cheap that you can produce so as to quickly get yourself to the point that you can begin to afford some units for protection and anti-crime. Abandon all attempts to further grow your population or research until you get on top of this issue.
7)When you start getting back on top here, you'll have some runaway crime, yes. But the good news is that the crimes that can emerge are still pretty limited thanks to the low tech level. So even a huge amount of crime can only hurt you so much. And some happiness and gold producing buildings can counter those losses. Once you can afford to staff LE units, gradually enhance your crime control presence, starting with as much a focus as you can on simply reducing the crime level itself. Once you have crime taking a nose dive, then you'll want to train ONE LE unit, in each city that has lurking criminals, to specialize in all promotions and buildups that can give it Investigation values.
8) Once crime emergent buildings that are making it easy for those lurking thieves to hide out in your city are removed by diminishing the crime in your cities to 0 or less, you'll find that the investigator starts getting a real chance to successfully investigate these lurking criminals. Once investigated, you'll want to arrest them with an LE unit that's specialized as possible in combating criminals. If you don't have one or cannot afford to have one, then just try the arrest with one of your anti-crime LE units. Usually criminals are pushovers against any sort of LE unit anyhow. (But I HAVE seen an arrest lead to the death of the arresting officer!) Once you've gotten to this point where this begins happening, your city is usually freed up to focus on research and further growth.
The lesson here is that if you overgrow in population or city count too early, you can quickly end up causing yourself some serious nightmares. But you can always recover, even if it may lead to great risk during the effort to recover, as your cities end up unprotected thanks to the strike scenario.
EDIT: On further review I see you spammed for Tribalism so you really did grow into this without providing yourself with the economic platform to survive this fast a growth curve. Supporting additional cities without Barter is really tough.
This game is actually a really awesome 'dig yourself out of the hole' training scenario. I may want to do a Let's Play instructional video off this! lol Or use it for turning it over to the AI to see if I can train the AI to dig themselves out of this sort of situation as well.
I also want to get the basics of the trial mechanism built out. Both of these 'next steps' would be awesome to work in tandem with those above 2 goals as well.
