Last week, while listening to my Radio Sweden podcast, I heard this story about something called the ‘Alcatraz List’. It seems it is a list developed by Swedish law enforcement of the ‘most dangerous’ criminals in the country and there are concerns that it might not have been worth the expense to create it given that only half of the people on the list have received any jail time in the three years the list has been in existence. The story was pretty sparse on details so there wasn’t much to say. I did a bit of poking around on this wonderful series of tubes that is the internets and found this summary of report evaluating 14 initiatives designed to fight organized crime. Thank god the Swedes love to 1) do research, 2) write about it and 3) translate it.
Just an observation, Swedes apparently also love their white space. The amount of blank pages stuffed in the front of the report (you’ve got to get to page 6 of a 33 page report before you get to any content) and the margins in the report are so big (oh my god…it’s full of stars!) that I’m reminded of my school days as I tried desperately to pad my reports to get them to meet the minimum page requirements.
In 2006, the Swedish National Police Board decided that SEK 120 million (approx 15.5 million dollars. Eds.) would be released for police efforts aimed at fighting organised crime…It was hoped that the campaign would provide the Criminal Investigation Department and the police authorities with an incentive to commence
larger projects, which previously lacked resources.
That being said, even though the report is in typically restrained Swedish style there’s quite a bit here to raise an eyebrow. First, let this soak in:
Brå was commissioned to make an evaluation of the special campaign against organised crime, i.e. a thorough investigation of outcome and results made upon completion…This entails not just describing what was done within the campaign, but also why it was done, and whether it was the most efficient way of doing it.
Whoa…an actual evaluation of anti-crime initiatives? That is impressive all by itself. While in the U.S. the Department of Justice may do evaluations of initiatives I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find such work being done at the state level. While it may be basic management strategy, the idea that law enforcement initiatives should be clearly articulated with cost estimates and metrics to determine success or failure remains as elusive as bigfoot at sub-Federal levels in the U.S.. Given that 11 U.S. states have populations roughly equal or larger than Sweden’s 9 million and have significant amounts of personnel and resources devoted to law enforcement and anti-crime activities one would think there would be some interest to determine the effectiveness of their efforts.
Secondly they identified their broad targets as:
- Groups involved in organised crime: Hells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, Original Gangsters, Angereds Tigrar, Brödraskapet and A.S.I.R.
- The importation and distribution of cannabis in Sweden.
- Particularly difficult and serious crime over time, for example attacks on security transports.
Now, the report isn’t clear if their goals were more specific than this (How exactly is ‘organized crime’ defined? What in the world is ‘difficult and serious crime’?) and it might either have been included in the full report or be an issue with translation but such broad goals could lead to abuse of the program.
How? Glad you asked.
Imagine offering departments a big bucket of money to address the problems above. A good bureaucrat will look around at what they’re already doing and see if they can shoe-horn existing activities (via some creative writing) into this program resulting in extra money for no extra work. I’m not saying that happened here and knowledge that there would be an evaluation of funding and results would certainly go a long way to mitigating that risk but clear definitions would be helpful.
Some of the findings of the report:
- Much more is needed in the form of preventive action.
- Cooperation with municipalities and the social authorities involved in crime prevention
work has, however, not been developed within the project.
- Cooperation with private sectors has not been particularly developed either.
- What has been mentioned in the interviews as less successful, are those projects that have had a narrow focus, primarily those that have been directed towards a particular individual.
- Most projects within the campaign have been operational, and have been directed towards tactical analysis with short-term objectives, in the form of confiscation and legal
proceedings. Internationally, it has been put forward that there is a need for more strategically directed analyses within the police
- One implication regarding the projects that have, so far, been concluded, is that most of them are based on methods used by the police in their day-to-day police work.
It’ll be interesting to see if these points resonate within the Swedish justice system and they devote some energy to prevention, strategic planning and targeting, and incorporating non-law enforcement partners. They are, essentially, arguing to adopt an intelligence led policing model of which I’m a fan, although I haven’t seen it actually work as advertised in an ongoing basis (although I hear positive things out of Canada and the U.K).
I would really like to know what sort of intelligence and analytical techniques they found (un)helpful and incorporate in their operations. They get hinted at several times throughout the report but I can’t get a feel if they’re being intentionally vague, don’t see it as central to their initiatives or don’t really incorporate intelligence and analysis in their activities.
Update: Oh, and just for the record I do not approve of the new intro music for Radio Sweden.