Prevention of Organised Crime. A situational approach

Abstract

This final report is part of the Falcone project entitled ‘The Identification and Prevention of Opportunities that Facilitate Organised Crime’. Four participating countries, namely Finland, Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands, have each drawn up a report in which 15 cases of organised crime are described and analysed. These descriptions are based on data from police files. The goal of this analysis is to reveal the interfaces between the legitimate and illegitimate environments and to generate possibilities for preventive action. These indications for possible preventive interventions are called ‘red flags’. This final report comprises these ‘red flags’ from the four national reports and examines four selected topics in more depth: the role of public administration and local businesses, the legal professions, official and informal financial services, and forged official documents. The preventive approach is not primarily aimed at the perpetrators of organised crime, but rather at the facilitating circumstances of organised crime. It addresses governments, civilians and enterprises and is an attempt to make them feel responsible for the prevention of organised crime. The message is actually quite simple: if criminal organisations are able to easily acquire or access resources, then the number of these resources have to be reduced, or made more difficult to acquire or access.