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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
resource to fund a squad over which they will have no control. What happens, for example, if
the South Wales police consider that a group of travelling criminals is causing them a lot of
problems: the sort of issue currently dealt with by the Regional Crime Squad or by the force
itself. Will the new NCS take it on? There is always a problem about differences in seriousness
perspectives between London and the regions (an issue that crops up also in uniform
national prosecution criteria): how will these be played out? This is the sort of issue that is
critical to many local police authority representatives and citizens who are making serious
local demands on the police. But this very parochialism of perspective enables the ‘take
organised crime seriously coalition’ to argue that it is vital for central authority to impose
collective benefits.
The role of the security services in relation to ‘organised crime’
This is not the place for a discussion of the role of the security services in sustaining Pax
Britannica (or, in the case of the CIA, Pax Americana), fruitful though such a review would
be. Suffice it to observe that despite the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union is unlikely
to bring an end to anti-capitalist terrorism, there is a felt need to find a new role for the sort of
expertise that is unlikely to have a significant niche outside multinational corporations (and
therefore faces a difficult time ‘on the dole’). There is also a common feeling in some
Establishment circles that most police are too parochial and frankly too dull and unsophisticated
to play a major role in dealing with brighter criminals: there is a certain class and
educational barrier between ‘cop culture’ (however changing in the light of teamwork and
proactive policing) and ‘spook culture’. (Although the latter may be more akin to normal
thought processes in government and civil service, the police - possibly responding to social
legitimacy - do appear to have an extraordinary hold on Home Office ministers.)
The Security Service Act 1996 inter alia gave MI5 a potentially important role in the fight
against organised crime (or, in the terms of the Act, ‘serious crime’: an important piece of
terminological slippage). Section 1 refers to the function of the Service to act in support of the
activities of police forces and other law enforcement agencies in the prevention and detection
of serious crime.
In Opposition, the ‘new realist’ Labour Party - keen to be tough on crime as well as the causes
of crime - acquiesced in the role and the greater part of the Bill. However, stimulated by
criticism in the Observer and Guardian newspapers that these important constitutional
changes had been passed with only the most cursory debate in the House of Commons (and
with very modest debate in the House of Lords’ Second Reading), some objection was made
by Labour peers in the Committee Stage in the House of Lords to the breadth of definition of
‘serious crime’ in what is now Section 2, in the context of the basis on which warrants to
enter and seize property and interception warrants were to be granted. In sub-section 4,
conduct is serious crime if it constitutes (or, if it took place in the United Kingdom, would
constitute) one or more offences, and either -
(a) it involves the use of violence, results in substantial financial gain or is
conduct by a large number of persons in pursuit of a common purpose; or [my
italics]
(b) the offence or one of the offences is an offence for which a person who has
attained the age of twenty-one and has no previous convictions could be
expected to be sentenced to imprisonment for a term of three years or more.
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