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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Anna Markina, Lecturer
Department of Criminology and Sociology of Deviant Behaviour
National Defence and Public Service Academy
61 Kase tee, 00020 Tallinn, Estland
e-mail: anna@endpsa.ee
46
On Profiling Organised Crime in Estonia
Introduction
One and a half year ago I prepared my first paper on organised crime that was presented here,
in Espoo. The data sources I then used were interviews with law enforcement officials,
mainly the members of the Estonian Crime Prevention Committee. Since, I have concentrated
my research on organised crime problems. I have tried to collect information on organised
crime from any official data source. Besides the interviews with law enforcement officials, I
have used memos issued by the Estonian Criminal Police, the responses to the organised
crime surveys from the Europol. Finally, I have composed my own very short questionnaire.
In this paper I will give the overview of the sources and try to compose the whole picture of
organised crime as it is seen by the Estonian Law Enforcement agencies.
I am completely aware that the data from the police or prosecution are not the only sources
for information about organised crime. Interviewing criminals and mass media analysis are
the other possibilities.
What is profiled?
First of all, we should agree on what is profiled when one is talking about 'organised crime'. It
is necessary to start with the clarification of the terms used. Although starting every paper
with the definition of organised crime seems to be boring, the definition of the phenomenon
could not be omitted since it varies from country to country and even from expert to expert.
The notion 'organised crime' is not mentioned in the Estonian Criminal Code or any other
legal act in Estonia. The only appropriate definition is given in paragraph 196'1 in the
Estonian Criminal Code in which 'criminal alliance' is defined as: "a stable group of three or
more persons with division of labour, associated for the purpose of committing offences of
the first and second degree".
The expression 'criminal group' (which is not the same as a group of criminals) is often used
synonymously for the 'criminal alliance'. When talking about organised crime, Estonian
experts as a rule talk about criminal groups. In this way, the definition of organised crime how
Estonian policemen use it could be roughly re-formulated as "Organised crime is a sum of
criminal groups". Therefore, following this definition, one should describe all the groups in
order to describe organised crime in Estonia. From a criminological point of view the
phenomenon of organised crime and criminal groups are not the same. A simple description
of the organised crime groups does not take into account societal consequences of organised
crime.
It is worth to mention that in fact, criminal alliance, in turn, is treated as a number of
criminals acting together. Often the number of groups per 100,000 population measures the