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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
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‘Organised Crime is a multi-million pound industry. The new National Crime Squad
will be targeting drugs traffickers and other serious professional criminals who
threaten the integrity of our financial system by fraud and money-laundering. We are
not establishing a British equivalent of the FBI. There will be no federal crimes.
Second, no direct recruitment: police officers will continue to be seconded from their
local police forces. All crimes will still be reported locally. Tripartite accountability
arrangements will remain.’
The Liberal Democrats had great reservations about the proposals, and Labour, at least in
opposition, wanted more accountability, while agreeing that everything possible should be
done about the menace of organised crime. The future of organised crime policing depends
partly upon what resources the Security Services and the Secret Intelligence Services actually
have available for this task (and how many ‘problems’ are caused in other areas, such as
Northern Ireland); partly on the avoidance of scandals of corruption and improper use of
power; and partly on how far any beefing up of the value of the National Criminal
Intelligence Service (NCIS) can achieve legitimacy in the eyes of operational police officers,
in the internecine quarrels that are as prevalent among anti-organised crime agencies as they
are elsewhere in the criminal justice system and in academia. To this extent, the fears of many
on the liberal left about the totalitarian dangers posed by the Organised Crime-fighting State
are misconceived. On the other hand, these fights among organised crime-fighters over ‘rep’
and ‘turf’ constitute a cost in terms of effectiveness for those who believe that the real enemy
is the mixed set of crime entrepreneurs who are sometimes collected up under the label of
‘organised crime’.
Judgments about the ‘need’ for centralised police squads are greeted with suspicion as an
attempt to shift resources away from local concerns (and the political expression of those
local concerns) towards the London Metropolitan interests manifested in the Home Office.
Yet one of the beauties of the system of police accountability in Britain is that responsibility
can always be shifted when desired. Let us take as an example the proposal of the Home
Affairs Committee (1995: para 124) that the Home Secretary should use his power to
nominate Key Performance Indicators under the Police and Magistrates Courts Act 1994 to
prioritise the following up on suspicious transaction reports by bankers (which Gold and Levi,
1994, found to be very modestly undertaken). The response of the government was (Home
Office, 1996, para 25):
The government accepts that difficulties can be caused by delays in the suspicious
financial transaction reporting system. However, we do not consider it appropriate to
use the powers ....The Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1994 devolves greater
responsibility to police authorities and chief constables for the control and use of the
resources available, and for determining their local priorities. The Government
considers that the processing of suspicious transactions is a matter for local forces to
manage.
Admittedly, it is difficult to envisage a formula that would permit the logical transformation
of local into national issues, but there are no reasons given here other than that the Home
Secretary did not consider this to be a key area. Yet at the same time, there is pressure from a
London coalition to go for a tougher centralised approach that will be mandated.
The National Crime Squad will be paid for by a levy upon existing police authorities, and it
remains to be seen how happy they will feel about being required to give up part of their