Defining Organised Crime and Assessing Trends through Official Records

• In Event: Studying Organized Crime Around the World: The Benefit of Different Methodological Approaches

Abstract

Organised crime is notoriously difficult to define and the analysis of offenders has often remained abstract or dominated by ‘offender based’ methodology, that concentrates on those who are proactively investigated by law enforcement agencies. This study uses a wider ‘offence based’ methodology using three filters to discriminate organised crime offenders from the general offending population (the commission of specific offences, incarceration of three years or more, and evidence of co-offending). This allows trends over time to be investigated. Using data held within the UK Police National Computer (PNC), over a 4 year period, it compares organised crime offenders (N=4109) against general and serious crime offenders. Organised crime offenders are differentiated from the comparison offender groups on a variety of criteria, and the implications for policy makers and practitioners within the Criminal Justice System are discussed. Further it suggests the ‘offence based’ methodology provides a wider opportunity to compare such offenders across much larger databases in a diverse range of judicial and cultural territories.

Authors

• Stuart Kirby, Lancaster University UK

• Brian Francis, Lancaster University UK

• Les Humphreys, Lancaster University UK