Finding smugglers

[Deathball]

So I've recently gotten a message about how one of my starports detected a pirate smuggler and I'm wondering what triggered that. Is it just random? Is it dependent on the starport? Also I've been doing my best to keep pirates down by destroying their bases and killing all the "independent" freighters around them but this seems to produce some hefty reputation hits, is there any better way to hunt smuggling ships?

[Darkspire]

Two words. Ship Scanner or some such, its on the hightech tab, looks like a colorful wormhole, in the top row with long range scanners, with that fitted to a star port they pick up on the pirate smugglers, caught me out when it first happened as well [:)]

Darkspire