Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

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NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998 This BKA definition provides a baseline to determine whether a criminal group ranks as ‘organised crime’, but ‘major importance’ is undefined, perhaps on the assumption that, to quote one senior British officer’s analogy with organised crime, ‘if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and shits like a duck, it probably is a duck’: an approach to definition that satisfied the British Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee (1995). ‘Organised crime’ can mean anything from the Camorra to three very menacing burglars and a window cleaning business who differentiate by having one as look-out, another as burglar and a third as money-launderer, and who sue every newspaper who suggests that their business is disreputable! The term ‘organised crime’ has an emotional kick which makes it easier to get resources and powers in circumstances that are quite vague in their ambit, and sociologists of crime control ought to study this labelling process in its own right. Despite the European Convention on Human Rights and variations in constitutional and data protections, there is a move throughout Europe to enhance police powers, to improve liaison between and within national police forces, and to harmonise and review the implementation of money-laundering legislation as measures against ‘it’. Even British politicians, who historically have rejected the continental model of centralised forces – anything that Napoleon in particular or the French in general liked is ipso facto undesirable! – were more than willing to set up the National Criminal Intelligence Service and, in 1998, the National Crime Squad, described by the media (but denied by the Home Secretary) as being a ‘British FBI’. These are assisted by the Security Services (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Services (MI6), which seek a ‘social defence’ role after the collapse of the Soviet Union: the latter was publicly praised by the UK Foreign Secretary in April 1998 for its contribution to the fight against organised crime (though, not surprisingly, no details were released). There may be those who see this as a sinister conspiracy by those wishing to establish a ‘police State’, but one should note that the developments of centralised police units are resented and resisted by most regional Chief Constables, who are concerned lest this expansion be at the expense of their own budgets and prestige. In the wider European arena, there has been a flurry of activity in the European Union and the Council of Europe, accelerating since the 1996 EU Dublin Summit (itself stimulated by the Irish government’s response to the high-profile contract killing of crime journalist Veronica Guerin): high level multi-disciplinary groups have sought areas of co-operation, implemented a High-Level Action Plan and finally got Europol off the ground by 1999. The EU and the Council of Europe are training EU applicant countries and others in anti-laundering implementation: EU legislation concerned with organised crime and some machinery for putting it into effect is required to be in place before accession to the EU. EU-wide measures to criminalise membership of criminal organisations – influenced by the Italian legislation but harder to apply in less regimented settings – and tough action against criminal offshore finance centres are under contemplation in 1998. It is not only the EU and Council of Europe that have been active in outreach programmes. The model mechanism for anti-laundering policies remains the Financial Action Task Force (started only in 1989 by the G-7 – now G-8, including Russia - élite industrial countries), with its system of ‘peer review’ by other countries – a concern with implementation as well as the passing of legislation which was novel at the beginning of the 1990s. The UN has also become involved increasingly in this arena, especially in the drugs issue but later on all-crime anti-laundering measures, as the boundaries between proceeds of different types of crime become increasingly blurred. The arrival in the top UN Drug Control and Crime Prevention 6
NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998 post of Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist-turned-politician Mafia expert, placed organised crime at the top of the 1998 UN criminological agenda, with a rapidly devised draft UN Convention on the subject. This great political confluence has led to international pressure to harmonise the fight against organised crime, even if people do not always have a clear understanding of what ‘it’ is. However, the nature of ‘organised crime’ remains deeply contested terrain, at least in academic circles and in those countries who are more worried about loss of independence and civil liberties than they are about subservience to organised crime. The role of intelligence agencies - regarding which the CIA is the best documented - in covert military operations overseas, especially in support of anti-Communist military regimes or guerrilla movements, makes ‘State-Organised Crime’ often a more appropriate term1. By contrast, the term ‘organised crime’ tends to focus us downwards towards the threat posed by some (usually alien) group of low-lifes, and one can see this in the work of the journalist Claire Sterling (1991, 1994), who appeared merely to reflect the ideological perspectives of US enforcement agencies. However, a note of caution. To explain the bureaucratic and ideological functions of the term ‘organised crime’ does not by itself demonstrate that the term is inappropriate, nor does it tell us anything about whether or not there are any long-term groups of criminals who commit serious offences or even begin to constitute the State. The epistemological difficulties are what sort of evidence one uses to account for the structuring of criminal behaviour; the range of criminal behaviours that come under the umbrella of any group of criminals; how far up the political chain one reaches in one’s delineation of who are organised criminals (in Colombia and Mexico, for example); and how valid is the ‘evidence’ upon which one relies2. The nature of organised crime and ‘its’ markets It must first be re-emphasised that our construction of how crimes are organised depends on our knowledge, and what counts as ‘knowledge’ rather than ideological ‘spin’ is at some times less problematic than at others. Take, for example, the following situation (see, further, Levi, 1998), which was discovered by accident rather than as a result of conscious police targeting. In the early 1990s, the team of Chinese who were gaily distributing their counterfeit Gold Cards on a train in the South of England were very distressed when they were spotted by an off-duty policewoman who happened to be walking past them. Had they not been detected, they probably would have committed hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of fraud, and only in retrospect – if at all - would the credit card companies have dealt with it as organised crime. Even then, the police – and researchers who were dependent on the police – might never have had the case referred to them or might never have investigated it because they were too busy (Levi and Pithouse, forthcoming). In North-western Europe, organised crime as a criminal economy is essentially a cross-border crime-trade (van Duyne, 1993, 1996). Despite the impact of modern horticulture on growing cannabis in the inclement weather of the UK, or of synthesising drugs – making importation from outside Europe or even the UK unnecessary - some element of cross-border trade is 1In mid-1998, the trial of senior politicians from the Gonzalez government and senior Civil Guard officials into atrocities committed as part of the ‘war’ against the Basque ETA will reveal extensive money-laundering in support of the assassinations of those believed to be ETA supporters. This meets all of the BKA definition of organised crime, though its adherents doubtless thought that they were doing it for the legitimate State. 2Without descending too far into post-modernism, it is obvious that what counts as evidence depends partly on what one wishes to believe. 7
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