Effectiveness: Law Enforcement -v- Organised Crime

[davidbfpo]

Tackling child pornography is often seen as 'organised crime' and this week David Cameron, the UK PM, announced some new steps and this led to a figure being given by a former CEOP head on BBC Radio 4:

There are 50,000 predators, we're told by CEOP, downloading images on peer-to-peer, not Google, peer-to-peer. Yet from CEOP intelligence, only 192 were arrested last year.

Link:http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/383215/p...-ex-ceop-chief

Elsewhere an Opposition speaker claimed; citing the same figures with "spin" IMO:

Despite identifying 50,000 cases of British residents accessing images of child abuse online last year, Ceop had pursued only about 2,000.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23393851

CEOP is the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, originally a LE body, it now has extensive commercial and charity funding.

[bourbon]

Tackling child pornography is often seen as 'organised crime' and this week David Cameron, the UK PM, announced some new steps and this led to a figure being given by a former CEOP head on BBC Radio 4:

Link:http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/383215/p...-ex-ceop-chief

Elsewhere an Opposition speaker claimed; citing the same figures with "spin" IMO:

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23393851

CEOP is the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, originally a LE body, it now has extensive commercial and charity funding.

I don't think pushing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to “do more” is going to help much. The problem is likely on P2P and TOR networks, and facilitated by an global cybercrime infrastructure that is partly state-sanctioned (the lines between organized cybercrime and national cyber war/intel programs get blurry).

[Fuchs]

Organised crime was the favourite bogeyman used in Germany to undermine privacy protection against the state, long since replaced by terrorists and paedophiles.


The actual treatment of organised crime by the German government(s) looked very different from the rhetoric, at least as far as I can tell:

Some organised crime was suppressed by bilateral police cooperation, notably cooperation with Romanian police against Romanian clans which went on outright looting campaigns in Germanyi in the early/mid 90's, crashing with trucks into jewellery and electronics stores and so on.

On an even larger scale, German law enforcement appears to have become fed up with overly violent foreign organised crime groups (Albanians, Russians, Chinese, occasional Italian Mafia in exile and the like). They cracked down on particularly violent groups, but the really grand design appears to have been to apply asymmetric pressure.
LE pressured the foreign organised crime, but apparently largely tolerated predominantly German 'rocker' gangs (Hell's Angels, Bandidos), which consequently took over market shares.
Organised crime learnt the lesson to stay in the shadows and not attract undue attention with anything spectacular such as blowing up a Mafia racket pizzeria and the like.

The story of the last few years is that some 'rocker' gang chapters got into conflict with each other* or simply too brazen and thus provoked crackdowns by state ministries of the interior and LE, leading to the apparent dissolution of the offending chapters.


So German LE appears to have had a simple grand strategy concerning law enforcement: It's always been, it will always be - but it better behave in public or else.


Just my observations and opinion, of course. The ordinary policeman on patrol may tell you a less (or even more) cynical story if you ask him about it.


*: Including famously blowing buildings up or shooting at each other with Panzerfaust munitions.