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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
The recorded number of assault offences has after the mid-1990s started to increase and this
increase may continue. This statistical development does not, however, reflect general
violence rates as measured by victimisation surveys. These are rather on a downward track.
Recorded theft offences have been on a rather stable level in the 1990s. Also here, population
surveys rather indicate a downward than an upward trend, at least as far as private persons are
concerned.
Other crime changes of the 1990s, at least if we look for characteristics that are new, are
primarily the fact that the role of foreigners - as perpetrators as well as victims - is gaining in
importance, parallel to the fact that immigrants from many directions, also from the East, are
becoming more common.
The public crime debate takes up a multiplicity of topics, from pedophilia and rapes to economic
crimes. All this has quite little to do with large crime categories and their changes. An
increased interest in economic crime has, however, been paralleled by a clear improvement in
the control of this type of offences.
Above, I have repeatedly referred to "recorded crimes". The crime statistics produced as a
byproduct of police activities is not unproblematic, if factual crime changes are looked for.
For the same reasons, direct comparisons with other countries are on an insecure basis if these
data are relied upon. Police statistics are working statistics of the police force, and depict the
development in field only in a secondary sense.
An important improvement in this regard are the so-called victimisation surveys. In these,
representative population samples are asked about their crime experiences and, i.a., reporting
crimes to the police. The results are clear: surveys often provide a different picture of the
development than the one derived from police sources. In the case of Finland, a long-term
trend of an increasing reporting activity is found to have taken place. In an international
comparison, the Finnish crime rates are rather low, a fact that is not easy to believe if
recorded crime is compared. This discrepancy indicates that crime statistics in Finland are
more advanced and more comprehensive than in many other counmtries. -Another trend that
is revealed by victimisation surveys is a continuing increase in the fear of or concern for
crime, as well as of a growing popularity of measures taken to avoid victimisation.
Police have not been dealt with abov (with the exception of reportign behaviour). Essential
tendencies have been the professionalisation of the police and a tendency to complement
traditional reactive policing with proactive programs (this is likely to increase recorded
crime). Most recently, crime prevention and community policing have been adopted in their
official task descriptions. Thus, also the earlier centralization tendencies of policing are about
to be reconsidered. Parallel to these developments, a comprehensive automatization of the
police information systems has resulted in an increasingly comprehensive recording of crimes
- a phenomenon that has an independent growth influence on recorded crime.
Police resources in Finland are not very large. Of these, a considerable proportion is spent on
various supportive activities, automatic data processing representing the new growth industry
among these. Also, police resources have been cut to achieve savings in public expenditure.
Such changes may have a visible effect on recorded crime cleared through the own activities
of the police - some of the recent stagnation in recorded crime may be attributed to these
circumstances.
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