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

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Estonian background, is growing in all types of crime. The explanation could be quite simple:
the proportion of Estonians in the population is growing as well. As we can see, the
involvement of Estonians is higher in economic types of crime. These numbers support the
information obtained from the interviews with policemen.
To sum up, the numerical data on recorded crimes does not provide enough information to
make any conclusion about the extent of organised crime in Estonia. It could be used,
however in combination with the information gained from the interviews with law
enforcement officials to illustrate some trends. On the other hand, interview data could and
should be used to interpret crime statistics.
Conclusions
In the presented paper three sources of information about organised crime were analysed:
interviews with police officials, questionnaire data and crime statistics.
The most informative source has with no doubts been the interviews with officials. This is the
best source for data about the groups, about the history of organised crime and the trends.
Only interviews could clarify the usage of terms by the police. This, in turn, can help to avoid
some misunderstandings.
The questionnaires help when there is a need for quantitative information and there is no
official statistics available. Questionnaire could, probably, help to follow the changes in the
activities of organised crime groups in one particular country. I would, however, be critical to
use these data for comparisons between countries. The questionnaire is also useful to make
information gained from the interviews more concrete because it does not allow
generalisations.
Crime statistics in the way it exists in Estonia now could be used to illustrate the data on
organised crime group activities that was collected from the other sources.
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