Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely recognised by society. As such the seriousness of organised crime relative to terrorism, for example, was consistently underplayed.
There was also much concern about the serious organised crime agency (SOCA) – not about its role per se but rather more seriously where the organisation had disappeared to. Almost overnight Stephen Lander (ex DGSS and now Chair of SOCA) had drawn a blanket of secrecy around the organisation, but not before he had announced that serious criminals had roughly a 5% chance of being caught.
So it was interesting to read Sean O’Neill in The Times today asking the question – are we ignoring organised crime? He makes an unhelpful but nevertheless interesting comparison – more than 700 people are killed by heroin in Britain every year while terrorism in Britain, by contrast, killed no one, nor the year before and has not claimed a life since July 7, 2005. But as O’Neill suggests
Yet it is terrorism that Gordon Brown says we must fear above all else. There are, he and his ministers and security officials keep telling us, 30 active plots against Britain – although keen observers might note that the number never seems to change no matter how many conspiracies are foiled.
It took 9/11 to force Britain to take the Islamist terrorist threat seriously. Since then the counter-terrorism agencies have turned Britain into a hostile environment for terrorists. Organised crime, however, doesn’t do spectaculars. The men behind it are interested in profits, not propaganda and, as a result, their reach into our society is much more insidious and unchecked than that of terrorism.
The mismatch between the resources devoted to fighting organised crime compared with those directed towards counter-terrorism is unnerving. Government says that there are millions of pounds in police budgets that should be devoted to dealing with organised crime. In truth, only a handful of British police forces know how to tackle it.
But surely it is a good thing to keep your head down and get on with the job? Well not if you need to justify your organisation’s role to Ministers and senior officials in the system… something that all Whitehall departments understand they must do if they are to secure funding.
So what has been the result of so much secrecy?
Ministers have trimmed Soca’s budget this year. Far from expanding to counter the ever-growing threat, the agency is shrinking and there is smouldering unhappiness in the ranks. Soca’s budget for taking the fight to the cartels and syndicates is £400 million – exactly the same amount that the Government intends to spend overseas in countries such as Pakistan on workshops and seminars to counter al-Qaeda’s ideology. Meanwhile, the demands on Soca have increased as MI5 and MI6, realising the big money (and their future) is in terror, have all but abandoned the fight against international crime.
Terrorism is a high-visibility threat and rightly commands a well-resourced and highly visible response. Serious organised crime prefers to operate in the shadows – beatings behind the locked doors of brothels, drug deals done in dank stairwells on sink estates. But out of sight should not mean out of mind.
