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

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).
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