Time to get unorganised
If there is one thing that the UK criminal justice system is extremely good at it’s combating volume crime – all the level 1 offences that are usually solved through good old fashioned police work. However, the growth in terrorism and cross border/international crime is changing all the rules. This sort of activity is generally typified by people gathering around a person, cause, value or even technology, like the Internet. As a result, it is extremely disjointed and clusters can be formed and disintegrated in more or less real time, with members coming from many different countries around the globe.
The speed and flexibility of operation that this type of structure enables has made it extremely difficult to combat using traditional policing methods. As a result, even some types of organised crime, such as cyber-crime, are also now moving this way and morphing their operations in order to adopt a much more unstructured approach. If this type of crime is to be successfully combated, new ways need to be found to identify potentially damaging patterns of behaviour and disrupt emerging clusters. In other words, rather than doggedly persisting with conventional techniques, we need to try lots of different approaches, and start doing more of what works and stop doing the things that don’t.
As yet, no-one has a silver bullet to do this, but maybe there is a lesson to be learned from the perpetrators themselves? Conventional, organised crime used to be based on a "command and control" model, just like the police. So maybe the solution to combating emerging patterns of criminality lies in mirroring the same behaviour and forming unique clusters of specialists - from the police, criminal justice agencies, expert partners and technology providers – who can pool their knowledge and resources to combat specific threats.
It is Fujitsu’s belief that such “unorganised” crime groups would act as a powerful innovation model and would provide the best opportunity to combat evolving threats. Of course, the success of this approach depends on a fairly radical change in mindset, but Fujitsu has the capacity, capability and commitment to help make it happen. So maybe it’s time the criminal justice system got itself unorganised?
Francis Galliano,
Head of Criminal Justice,
Fujitsu Services
