Organised crime

OPINION: The Australian Federal Police’s recent Operation Kraken targeted organised criminals who were using the Ghost encrypted app, and among those arrested was a senior syndicate member believed to have run a disinformation campaign; Dr John Coyne and Justin Bassi of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) warn that, with the demand for disinformation activities growing, the threat posed by fee-for-service organised criminals needs to be addressed.

FEATURE: Author, journalist and former Police Scotland superintendent Martin Gallagher explores the links between organised crime, terrorism and state-sponsored violence – from Indian-backed assassination attempts on Canadian soil, to firebombs in UK and European warehouses, and the efforts of Irish crime groups and Northern Irish paramilitaries to cultivate links with Russia and Iran.

INTERVIEW: Human trafficking and exploitation stretches far beyond borders. Former MPS Superintendent Bernie Gravett who led the first joint trafficking investigation in Europe and who now specialises in counter-trafficking training tells Policing Insight’s Contributing Editor Sarah Gibbons that training overseas officers is key to helping tackle serious and organised crime in the UK.

FEATURE: Operation First Light, the global police operation led by INTERPOL, secured impressive results, freezing more than 6,700 bank accounts and seizing assets worth $257 million; but as Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth reports, while the operational achievements deserve praise, the scale of this criminal endeavour highlights the continuing success of scammers who combine hi-tech channels with appeals to the most basic of human emotions.

FEATURE: The latest United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report highlights record levels of cannabis and cocaine use – with an accompanying rise in violence – and the increased agility of traffickers who are expanding their criminal activities into areas such as wildlife trafficking, illegal resource extraction and money laundering, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: While scams may have traditionally been viewed as mainly opportunistic offences of consumer fraud, Deloitte fraud and intelligence specialist Paul Curwell and Nicholas McTaggart, financial crime consultant and former Australian Federal Police national co-ordinator, warn that increasingly sophisticated and AI-based scams are being used to raise funds for terrorist organisations and transnational serious and organised crime groups, and need a more co-ordinated global response.

FEATURE: Environmental crimes such as large-scale dumping, illegal waste sites, and illegal export of waste have become one of the fastest growth areas for organised crime groups; Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth explores the scale of the problem, and efforts by countries across Europe to tackle the threat using the latest technologies including artificial intelligence.

ANALYSIS: Europol has identified 821 criminal networks with 25,000 members from 112 different nationalities which carry the biggest threat both inside the EU and internationally – based on the fact they are agile, borderless, controlling and destructive – and has called for “a culture of proactive international police co-operation” to tackle the threat, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: A new report from the UK’s National Rural Crime Network has highlighted the role of organised crime in many of the machinery thefts devastating farming communities; Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons spoke to Northumbria Police Superintendent Andy Huddlestone, head of the National Rural Crime Unit, about the need for better data sharing, more resources, and greater prioritisation by forces to tackle a growing crime trend.

OPINION: Alongside the estimated $60 billion costs to Australia and Australians of transnational serious and organised crime (TSOC), there are significant impacts on individuals and communities, political stability, and the environment; Dr John Coyne, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre, believes the time is right for a TSOC white paper to address this multidisciplinary, complex challenge.

INTERVIEW: In the latest in a series of interviews with leading figures involved in the research and investigation of organised crime (OC), Policing Insight’s Dr Chris Allen spoke to Chris Dalby, Director of OC publishing platform World of Crime, about why the age of the cartel may be coming to an end, how education could be the biggest weapon in the fight against organised crime, and the fact that many of those involved in organised crime would rather have a house, family and a middle-class lifestyle.

FEATURE: The Environment Agency has launched a new Economic Crime Unit which will work with police and revenue and customs in England to tackle organised waste crime including the dumping, burning and illegal shipping of waste, as well as the operation of illegal waste sites – a market estimated to cost the country £1billion a year, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A new report not only highlights the significant increases in wildlife trafficking – described as “off the scale” on some routes – but also the successes of a financial taskforce which is using traditional anti-money laundering and proceeds of crime techniques to target and disrupt offenders and supply chains, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: In the latest in a series of interviews with leading figures involved in the research and investigation of organised crime, Policing Insight’s Dr Chris Allen spoke to Dr Mariola Marzouk, co-founder of trade-based money laundering (TBML) specialists Vortex Risk, about the dangers of failing to understand the practicalities of TBML, going back to the drawing board to tackle money laundering, and why celebrating the successes against ‘stupid’ money launderers is a false reality.

INTERVIEW: In the latest in a series of interviews with leading figures involved in the research and investigation of organised crime, Policing Insight’s Dr Chris Allen spoke to Dr Eleanor Beevor, Senior Analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime about motorbike trafficking and armed criminals in the Sahel, environmental crime eradication, and how directly supporting people living in crime-affected areas can be transformative.

FEATURE: As we welcome in 2024, Policing Insight Editor Keith Potter looks back over what the past 12 months have meant for policing in the UK and internationally, how those issues have been covered by Policing Insight, and the continuing challenges and opportunities for the year ahead.

INTERVIEW: In the latest in a series of interviews with leading figures involved in the research and investigation of organised crime, Policing Insight’s Dr Chris Allen spoke to Dr Jordan Nunan, former police officer, Senior Lecturer in Criminal at the University of Northampton, and National Co-ordinator for the National Police Chief’s Council’s Intelligence Practice Research Consortium, about the value of police-academic partnerships, the Achilles heel tactic, and the crucial role of human intelligence sources in tackling organised crime.

INTERVIEW: In the latest in a series of interviews with leading figures involved in the research and investigation of organised crime, Policing Insight’s Dr Chris Allen spoke to Ben Burr, a Borders, Immigration and Intelligence Specialist with Viable Data who has more than 20 years’ experience in the Home Office, about the challenges of ‘burglary tourism’, the need for real-life policing experience in academic research, and why a global database of wanted, suspected and missing person biometrics could be game changing.

INTERVIEW: As international collaboration between law enforcement agencies becomes increasingly critical to combat contemporary organised crime, Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth spoke to Superintendent Ted Esplund and Project Manager Åsa Granström at the Swedish Police Authority about the importance of knowledge exchange as part of their participation in NOTIONES, a new European network bringing police agencies together to improve the capacity and capability of intelligence functions.

ANALYSIS: In October the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) marked 10 years in operation, a decade that has seen significant international operations, substantial convictions and drug seizures, and major technological advances; but as Cathy Haenlein, Director of Organised Crime & Policing at the Royal United Services Institute explains, the threat to the UK from serious and organised crime is on the rise, and policing alone cannot overcome that threat.

FEATURE: UK National Crime Agency Director General Graeme Biggar has warned that policing and the wider criminal justice system is not moving fast enough or far enough in its efforts to combat the shift online in serious and organised crime, and that the roll out of end-to-end encryption on sites such as Facebook would be “tantamount to consciously turning a blind eye” to child abuse, as Policing Insight’s Keith Potter reports.

ANALYSIS: Ahead of this week’s UK Society of Evidence-Based Policing (UK SEBP) Conference, National Crime Agency Temporary Director of Investigations John Denley, Keele University Academic Policing Collaboration Professor of Practice Marcus Beale, and Cambridge University Professor of Experimental Criminology Barak Ariel, highlight some of the key findings from their latest research drawing on police information and intelligence and the views of police professionals to explore new ways to prevent organised crime (the focus of an SEBP Conference session).

INTERVIEW: In the latest in a series of interviews with leading figures involved in the research and investigation of organised crime, Policing Insight’s Dr Chris Allen spoke to Dr Tetiana Melnychuk, Associate Professor at Ukraine’s National University Odesa Law Academy and visiting researcher at the Center for European and International Criminal Law Studies at the University of Osnabrück, about the ‘blurred edges’ of organised crime, preventing criminals infiltrating government and legal agencies, and the need to prepare for the restoration of law and order after the war in Ukraine.

OPINION: Shoplifting and retail theft have been subject to significant media and political focus over recent weeks, with the Government launching a new action plan while commentators call for tougher sentences to target organised gangs; but Transform Justice Director Penelope Gibbs argues that effectively tackling the problem will mean addressing the causes, improving diversion and rethinking the retail space, rather than simply increasing the sentence tariff.