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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
policing to cope with major criminal markets and ‘crime entrepreneurs’ has prompted the
search for more structured and ‘cost-effective’ approaches to policing. The Audit
Commission’s pressure for proactive ‘offender targeting’ has led to ‘intelligence-led policing’
becoming a dominant theme in British policing. In theory, suspicious transaction reporting by
bankers offers the possibility of doing so in a less prejudiced way than by use of police discretion,
via dispassionate computer-modelled neural network analysis. But in practice, we are
down to the same criteria of suspiciousness - of out-of-context behaviour - that the police use,
only operated this time by bankers.
The trend, at least in rhetoric, has been to aim to use financial institutions’ proactive reports
to generate information to
(a) pick out individuals who may be involved in crime who were not previously
suspected. (Of course, these could include political dissidents, but I do not believe
that this is a core objective.)
(b) provide greater substantiation of the activity trail of ‘known offenders’ in ways
that would be too expensive and time consuming to collect via traditional police
means.
But in practice, the police resources devoted to this have been very modest in Britain, even in
Northern Ireland which is the traditional experimenting ground for social control measures: if
one investigator can get through six routine enquiries a day, this makes around 30 a week,
perhaps 1,200 a year (out of national UK total of currently about 17,000 annually), without
doing anything other than check to see if the person is already ‘known to the authorities’. In
the UK, NCIS are completely overwhelmed by this reactive processing, and local forces are
similar - many do not even trawl their local intelligence databases. Elsewhere, the ‘yield’ of
reports is likewise the grounds for concern.
It is important to appreciate that regulatory as well as criminal law mechanisms are used to
control laundering, but there are practical and political/legal problems. What, for example,
does the Bank of England intend to do if a particular bank, building society or - newly
regulated - bureau de change does not report any suspicions one year? In the real world, are
the cops going to show any more interest than in the past in prosecuting bankers and lawyers
who have acted as intermediaries in major trafficking or fraud cases? Monitoring compliance
with anti-laundering procedures provides a constant justification for inspection of Third
World and other governments’ financial systems, but it also does lead to mutual pressure to
raise standards of commercial integrity, at least in relation to wilful blindness in accepting
funds that could only have come from crime.
Concluding remarks
Gradually (and see Sutton, 1998, for a valuable analysis of this in relation to stolen property
markets), criminologists have begun to see ‘the causes of crime’ as including an analysis of
how crime is organised socially and technically. This fuses the neglected traditions of
gang/subculture theory with situational opportunity theory, especially in its improved recent
formulations (Clarke, 1997; Clarke and Homel, 1997) in showing how the forms of crime are
shaped by the motivational and cultural environments in which they occur, which facilitate
and/or inhibit the development of highly organised crime, whether or not accompanied by
offender versatility. To understand how this is possible, we need to examine crime as a
business process, requiring funding, technical skills, distribution mechanisms, and moneyhandling
facilities. The larger the criminal business, the more likely all these elements will be
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