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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Finnish border, seems to be the most alarming. From 1990 to 1995 the murder rate grew from
5,8 to 20 per 100,000 inhabitants. And when one looks at the statistics concerning causes of
death, one may observe that only 60-70 percent of actual murders were ever registered! The
law enforcement officials of St. Petersburg estimate that there are up to 200 leaders of
“organized crime”, and up to 15,000 participants in “criminal organizations” living in the city.
Annually the authorities expose over 500 “criminal organizations” and around 2,000 crimes
and dozens of murders committed in the context of “organized crime”. At the same time, the
Finnish law enforcement officials do not even know how to register such categories.
Confiscations from the criminal groups of St. Petersburg include firearms, narcotics,
explosives and hard currency worth hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars, and the numbers
are increasing.
Several Russian law enforcement officials, criminologists from the Ministry of the Interior,
academics and reporters share the view that Russia is in a state of criminal chaos,
contaminated and infested with the phenomena that they describe as “organized crime”.
Meanwhile, the interaction between Finland and Russia has grown considerably in the 1990´s.
The flow of people, goods and capital has increased over the 1,300 kilometer border that
Finland, alone in the European Union, shares with the Russian Federation. In St. Petersburg
and its surroundings, only a few hundred kilometres from Helsinki, there are more people
than in the whole of Finland. The number of visits paid by Russian visitors to Finland has
skyrocketed up to one million people annually, which is an exceptional figure for a country of
five million. On their shopping sprees in Finland, the Russian tourists annually spend approximately
600,000 U.S. dollars. Annually over 300,000 Russian automobiles cross the border
and hit the Finnish roads. The volume of Finnish-Russian trade has grown considerably over
the past few years, exceeding the massive Soviet-Finnish clearing trade. A majority of the
75,000 foreigners living in Finland originate from the former Soviet Union, and their number
is expected to double over the next 10-15 years. Over 20,000 people living in Finland report
that they speak Russian as their mother tongue.
This economic, cultural and social interaction between Russia and Finland has reached levels
unknown in the history of the two countries.
Knowing the dangerous dimensions of crime in Russia, one may well ask about the criminal
consequences of the interaction between Finland and Russia. What kind of evidence does the
Finnish law enforcement have about crime originating in Russia? What kind of quantitative
and qualitative changes has the Finnish crime situation undergone? How is “Russian crime”
discussed in Finland? How is Finnish law enforcement reacting to crime originating in
Russia? What kind of security agenda has been established for combating this crime?
Rather paradoxically, the evidence produced by Finnish law enforcement does not reveal any
considerable quantitative growth or qualitative change, which could be attributed to Russian
influences, in the Finnish crime situation.
In spite of the annual volume of one million visitors from Russia, the statistics of crime and
conviction show that annually only about one percent of suspects and convicts are citizens of
Russia. The majority of the crimes committed by Russians are traffic offences and petty
larcenies, which applies to the general population equally. For instance, in 1996 only three
Russians and four Swedes were suspected of murder in Finland, while the number of Finnish
suspects was over 500.
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