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Organised criminals are smart. Their primary motivation is profit and they will adapt pretty much anything, including their modus operandi and the commodity they trade in, to ensure a constant cash flow and expansion of their activities.

The emergence of modern Brazilian criminal organisations can be traced back to the boom in incarceration and prison overcrowding in the 1990s. During this period, important changes were forged within prison spaces including the emergence of prison groups that, years later, would become criminal organisations. This development reconfigured local criminal dynamics by connecting organised criminality to incarceration. Among the groups that emerged within local prisons, the Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC [The First Capital Command] – is undoubtedly the most relevant in terms of its scope, size, economic resources, and stability.

According to a recent article published in The Times titled “Britain is cocaine capital of Europe”, cocaine use in the UK has increased by nearly 300 per cent in less than a decade. Cocaine trafficking, distribution and use has a significant impact on societal health, crime and development. Crack cocaine represents a central part of the United Kingdom’s (UK) cocaine problem. According to the Review of Drugs report published by Dame Carol Black in 2020, crack cocaine and opiate users generate 95% of the costs of drug-related crime in England and Wales.

Documentaries have increasingly become viable tools for social change. A recent landmark study shows an upward shift in social engagements towards global poverty following the release of “Stand Up Planet”, a documentary series on extreme poverty.

As Germany joins Canada and a handful of American states in legalising the sale, possession and consumption of recreational cannabis, countering organised crime must be at the heart of legislation.

This blog joint second place winner of the 2023 winner of the Bill Tupman Prize, submitted in partnership with the ECPR-SGOG Summer School.

National authorities suspect that “Primeiro Comando da Capital” (PCC), a powerful Brazilian criminal organization, is behind the theft of several aircrafts in the northern province of Chaco in Argentina. The trend has raised alarms over the PCC’s continued regional and international growth.

The crime of association for mafia-type offences was introduced into the Italian criminal justice system by law on 13 September 1982. Provision n. 646 (better known as the law “Rognoni-La Torre” drawn from the name of its promoters) was included in the criminal code among the crimes against public order. Prior to this, older versions of Article 416-bis of the criminal code punished individuals for their association with groups committing simple crimes. This quickly proved unsuitable to combat the complexity and scale of the evolving mafia phenomenon. The new crime-type instead identified the means and objectives that constitute the fundamental elements of a mafia association.

Due to the fragmentation of drugs markets and the adoption of less centralised criminal structures, transnational organised crime has spread throughout Latin American countries.

South Africa and Mexico face similar security challenges, particularly when it comes to criminal violence. Both governments have responded in a similar fashion for years, by employing joint police-military operations. However, in both countries those operations have repeatedly been unable to bring peace and stability in the long-term. They act as a reminder that a more holistic and multidimensional approach is required when dealing with deep-rooted security issues, the most damaging of which are institutional weakness at the local level and a lack of trust in government authorities.

In an attempt to demobilise armed groups in Colombia, President Gustavo Petro’s government implemented the policy of ‘Total Peace’ (Paz Total). Petro’s strategy looks to political negotiations and settlements to draw Colombia’s long-running civil conflicts to an end. However, the government’s selective and inconsistent definition of who constitutes a ‘political’ or ‘criminal’ actor threatens to undermine critical progress towards demobilisation.

As the UK establishes its post-Brexit independent sanctions regime, the potential to use sanctions against serious and organised crime has attracted growing attention. To add value, any move in this direction requires a clear strategy as to how sanctions would complement existing law enforcement tools.

Any future public security strategy to counter the PCC’s emerging influence in and out of Brazil must reinterpret the role of mass-incarceration in order to interrupt the self-sustaining structure of PCC recruitment and expansion. This is not to claim that imprisonment shouldn’t represent a key punitive and strategic asset against organised crime in Brazil, but that the conditions of incarceration should be a key consideration

Investigating authorities seem less willing to deploy covert tactics against organised criminals. Rob Le Core reviews the changing landscape.

Since the 1980s, ‘police encounters’ have been a notorious phenomenon in South Asia, especially in India and Pakistan.Jyoti Belur, who has researched encounters in Mumbai, defines an ‘encounter’ as a ‘specific type of police contact – a spontaneous, unplanned “shoot-out” between the police and alleged criminals, in which the criminal is usually killed, with few or no police injuries’.

Anyone familiar with the history of European police and judicial cooperation knows that the arrangements that existed in this area up to the Maastricht Treaty 1992 were a jumble of overlapping, complementary and opaque combinations of legislation. They included not only the mutual assistance treaties of the Council of Europe, but also secretive working relationships between the member states of the European Community (TREVI) and administrative support structures by a police fraternity, called Interpol.

The senseless shooting of Elle Edwards on Christmas Eve shocked the UK. Similar tragedies in the UK often have their origins in the supply of illicit firearms from Europe. To stem and turn the tide against gun violence, we must look towards Europe.

In Latin America, several armed groups, after having created and functioned as criminal organisations, have publicly engaged in political discourse. For these organised crime groups (OCGs), participating in plausible political dialogue is not easy.

The plan to introduce 10 freeports across the UK after Brexit has drawn attention in recent weeks. Introducing these provenly risky ‘special economic zones’ sits uneasily alongside the UK’s wider efforts to ramp up the fight against economic crime.

It must have been July 27th, 2012 or at the latest 2013, in Limbadi, a small town in the Vibonese province in Calabria, that on this day every year celebrates the patron Saint. When the Saint exits the church, I am sure that many – including myself – are wondering if the presence of Luigi Mancuso at the parade makes any difference. Luigi Mancuso, released from prison in July 2012, is considered the “boss” of the powerful ‘ndrina clan (Calabrian ‘ndrangheta clan) based in Limbadi, with offshoots in nearby villages.