Controlling Organized Crime
Organized crime is a form of crime, which is characterized by a regular criminal activity carried out by criminal organizations (organized groups, gangs, criminal networks and other illegal units) having a hierarchical structure, material and financial base and government relations, based on corruption mechanisms. An important feature of organized crime is its ability to rebuild public institutions with the formation of new substructures of criminal society, involving the broad masses of people through the use of corrupt practices and defamation, blackmail and “liquidation” people. The scale of organized crime is high, as well as the level of damage from it. Combating organized crime is much harder than the fight against common crime. Often organized crime has the resources (human, financial, political), comparable to the available official police authorities. Therefore, there are no methods are giving an opportunity to achieve significant success in the fight against organized crime quickly. Since over the last decade organized crime has expanded internationally, its considerable presence and significance should be combatted by the new law enforcement strategies and international cooperation as organized crime undermines the integrity of a global financial system, jeopardizes security and causes human misery.
Organized crime is a problem to many facets of society. It threatens peace and human security, ignores human rights, threatens world economic, as well as the social, political and civil development. According to Stephen L. Mallory (2012), criminal organizations allied with the political machines has grown owing to the gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering and loan sharking. Such groups gain their profit from the variety of white-collar and fraud crimes, drug-trafficking and bootlegging. Organized crime is the transnational and international issue, as groups usually form alliances to multiply their power and wealth. It is a major problem of U.S. law reinforcement because criminal organizations violate global socioeconomic and political processes (Mallory, 2012). As United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) states, transnational organized crime has many forms including human trafficking, smuggling migrants, toxic materials, military technologies and other contraband, and undermining world financial situation by money laundering. Organized crime has diversified and reached macro-economic proportions (UNODC, 2016). According to Global Trends 2015, over the next 15 years, transnational criminal organizations will become increasingly powerful by exploiting global diffusion of sophisticated information, financial and transportation networks. Available data shows that current annual revenues from illicit criminal activities include “$100-300 billion from narcotics trafficking; $10-12 billion from toxic and other hazardous waste dumping; $9 billion from automobile theft in the United States and Europe; $7 billion from alien smuggling; and as much as $1 billion from theft of intellectual property through pirating of videos, software, and other commodities. Available estimates suggest that corruption costs about $500 billion” (McNicoll, 2001, 26). It is clearly seen that organized crime significantly weakens the world economy with illegal activities which result in a tax loss for state and federal governments.
Criminal organizations have developed various relationships with the fields capable of bringing financial and power benefits. Organized crime groups are …
