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

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NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998 There was no suggestion in the wording that the violence has to be serious: it could be common assault. The response of the (then) Minister Baroness Blatch is illuminating (Hansard, 10 June 1996 HL cols. 1497-1539): 14 Crime does not always come in neat packages clearly labelled "serious" or "not serious". That is particularly true of the kind of work the Security Service will be doing. With its particular skills and experience, the service will be most effective gathering intelligence and infiltrating organised crime groups, who may extend tentacles into a wide range of activities. The very nature of the work means that the service will not always know what it is dealing with, particularly in the exploratory stages. Inevitably, some leads will be turn out to be blind alleys and criminal organisations may find novel forms of criminal activity which were on the margins of a rigidly defined serious crime. There is a need for a degree of flexibility...and common sense in determining what lies within the function, without transgressing on inappropriate areas of inquiry. ....a rigid definition of serious crime...would hamper the service’s effectiveness and create endless opportunities for unscrupulous defence lawyers to challenge the legitimacy of the Security Service’s involvement on technical grounds. It is much better that the Security Service should initially have a degree of freedom to develop investigations but, at the point when the service wishes to employ intrusive investigative techniques...it should be required to demonstrate that it is involved in combating serious crime as one of the controls over the issue of warrants.... That is not to say that the Security Service will end up dealing with trivial cases. Indeed, ministers have given repeated assurances that, in practice, the service is to be tasked with the investigation of organised crime, as it is commonly understood [my italics]. This means that the service’s principal targets under its new function will be drug traffickers, money launderers and racketeers. In other words, trust us! Objections to English legislation are made more difficult by the practice of amending complex sets of prior legislation, making it hard to formulate changes clearly in ways that can be followed by others. Nevertheless, as the first female Commander in the Metropolitan Police, (now) Baroness Hilton, replied: It is a very slippery slope down the path of non-accountability and potential injustice, not only to the public and the police but also the security services....This amendment is an important restraint on what could be an extremely dangerous situation and a constitutional impropriety. Baroness Blatch sought to reassure by stating that the Security Service will not in any event act independently of the police. It will be tasked by the police, or the work will be done in support of the police or the other agencies mentioned in the course of the debates. She added that this Bill conferred no new powers on the Security Service: merely its use of existing powers in a new area! This is verbal conjuring of a high order. As Labour peer Lord McIntosh observed:
NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998 We want an assurance that when it acts in support of the activities of police forces - in other words, in dealing with the criminal law in this country - it does not have powers that the police do not have. As for co-ordination of the police and the Security Services, the head of the NCIS will decide what should be done about operations where there is a conflict between keeping informants safe and making arrests. Further conflict arose on the issue of warrants by the Executive. One of the Law Lords, Browne-Wilkinson, observed that the Bill proposed a major constitutional shift towards the Executive in dealing not with espionage but with ordinary police duties ‘to invade the privacy of the Englishman’s home’. Minister Baroness Blatch responded that the Bill was merely an extension of existing powers. But as Lord McIntosh noted: We land up with the worst of all possible worlds on warrants. We land up with an extension of powers for the Security Service, not because they are new powers but because they are applied for the first time to the people of this country. We land up with inconsistent powers as between police and Security Service in pursuit of the same objective. We have a different trigger for the exercise of these powers...not an extension of the judicial trigger...but an extension of the trigger of the executive power.... There is no provision...for adequate accountability and scrutiny.... The predictable response to this was that the Security services have a security tribunal and commissioner and that warrants ‘will be secured on the basis of meeting the serious crime test set out in detail in Clause 2’ (which test is very easy to satisfy). Despite the attempts of authors from Sutherland (1983, originally 1939) to Ruggiero (1996) to argue that ‘white-collar crime is organised crime’, the UK enforcement agencies have been far more reluctant than their US counterparts to treat white-collar and organised crime as related phenomena, to be dealt with by policing methods such as ‘Sting operations’ : this is due partly to legal but mainly to cultural differences (Levi, 1995). Differences between the ‘performance indicators’ of police and customs, as well as bureaucratic rivalries, inhibit cooperation. The grafting on - or not - of the security services who are used to disruption and other extra-criminal justice tactics are likely to prove intriguing: such methods are seldom susceptible to review by the courts, especially when the suspect party does not know that there has been some intervention such as loss of potential business contract. The new financial policing: measures against money-laundering and asset forfeiture The other major plank of anti-organised crime activity involves greater scrutiny of persons and – to a lesser extent – transactions entering the global financial system. The regulation of financial institutions for other than financial prudential purposes embodies an intriguing political paradox. On the one hand, those interested in the political anatomy of Britain take it for granted that it is ‘finance capital’ that dominates the political economic landscape. On the other, we have first, bankers, and then a large range of other financial media in most advanced and many Third World and former Communist countries being compelled to accept a fairly open-ended set of commitments to co-operate in an increasingly active process of searching out and reporting those seeking to launder the suspected proceeds of crime (or to require them to report large quantities of cash and wire transfers, in those systems such as the USA and Australia that have routine cash reporting requirements). 15
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