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

Table 1. Criminal activities groups are involved in.
Criminal activity The number of
groups involved
in
Extortion 9
Fraud 8
Kidnapping 6
Robbery 5
Housebreaking 5
Vehicle theft 5
Narcotics 5
Armed robbery 4
Homicide 2
Prostitution 2
Illegal gambling schemes 1
Counterfeiting 1
Other types of crime 6
Source: Questionnaire
NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Table 1 gives the overview of the types of criminal activities that the groups are involved in.
All groups practise extortion and almost all of them are involved in fraud. Quite remarkable is
the fact that no group was involved in illegal trade in firearms, although this option was listed.
The results of the questionnaire also showed that all the groups are believed to be involved in
money laundering. Money laundering, however, is not criminalised in Estonia yet.
Statistical data
There is no statistics on how many persons were accused on organising or belonging to a
criminal alliance (§ 196'1). From the interviews with experts and the questionnaire we could,
however, conclude what types of crime could be the reflection of organised criminal
activities. Extortion, as we have seen before, is a type of criminal activity that all the groups
are involved in. The data on registered cases of extortion should reflect the scope of this
activity, if we could trust criminal statistics at all.
The idea is to examine the rate of the types of crime most common for criminal groups. The
other possibility is to look at the number of persons under prosecution for cleared offences
together with some other characteristics of offences available from crime statistics. There are
two parameters I would like to look at. Firstly, if the criminal offence was committed in a
group or not, and, secondly, the ethnic background of the offender.
51