“Organized crime tends to spread to new areas and arenas. For this reason we need more collaboration both at local and national level, but also between different municipalities such as Botkyrka and Södertälje,” says Amir Rostami.
Criminals collaborate more
The two researchers find that the number of collaborative offences has increased significantly. In the case of violent crime, there has been a sharp increase of between 60 and 111 per cent, depending on the number of people involved, compared to the year 1995.
However, in financial crime collaboration has increased the most: between 116 and 371 percent.
“Such crime involves fraud against the state, tax offences and welfare offences, but also fraud against individuals and these criminal profits are large. The criminal economy is estimated to have a turnover of 100 to 150 billion annually,” says Amir Rostami.
An ecosystem of multicriminals
Organized crime is a multi-criminal ecosystem of groups and individuals with different abilities, subculture and organization. If we only focus on the shootings and forget that they also engage in economic crime, we miss an important source of how they organize.
For Amir Rostami, a key to tackling organized crime is to make it difficult for the actors to organize themselves. Here it is important to avoid tunnel visions in which we allow shootings or vulnerable neighbourhoods to overshadow all other crime problems.
“Actions against organized crime need to focus on strengthened controls of financial and subsidy systems, thereby reducing their room for action. There is also a great focus on the police when other authorities can have a greater effect on organized crime,” says Amir Rostami.
Text: Douglas Öhrbom