Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

POLICING CHALLENGES
Fraud and policing
Professor Michael Levi provides a briefing
for police and crime commissioners
Michael Levi is Professor of
Criminology, Centre for Crime,
Law and Justice, Cardiff School
of Social Sciences, Cardiff
University
Fraud is a deceptively simple word
covering a very broad territory.
It is a way of making money
illegally via deception, whether that
deception is directly person-to-person in
real space or in virtual space; operates
by false stories alone, via the use of false
physical or e-documents or via Personal
Identification Numbers or uses genuine
or phoney businesses as tools of fraud.
Some are planned as scams from the
start, sometimes as part of an organised
crime group (OCG) activity; others –
with or without involvement of outsiders
– are the result of insiders spotting
system weaknesses which, if undetected,
may spread from there into much larger
schemes.
Fraud offers higher rewards and
lesser risks of long jail time than
does conventional crime, posing the
question of why would people commit
other property crimes (or even drug
trafficking) if they could commit fraud
What is clear is that these problems will
not go away.
Concern about fraud has been
growing in governmental, policing
and in some business circles, because
it is regarded as the modern crime.
In England and Wales, the Fraud Act
2006 1 made it simpler to prosecute.
Mainstream criminal justice resources
have not kept pace with these concerns,
and City scandals in 2012 have
highlighted the disgust people feel
at bankers ripping them off without
retribution.
The Annual Fraud Indicator 2012
estimates UK fraud at £73 billion,
including fraud against individuals at
£6.1 billion, compared with £2.18
billion for theft, burglary and robbery
against individuals combined (estimated
in 2003, since when property crime
figures have fallen).
But fraud is not just an issue for
London and other major centres of
finance. National Fraud Authority (NFA)
data shows that fraud is widely spread
around the country, in all social and age
segments 2 . Research shows that nearly
half of the UK population has been
targeted by scams, and that one in 12
will fall victim at least once during their
lifetime 3 .
The police response to fraud
What is the current and planned policing
response to these issues Investigation is
currently distributed within a declining
number of specialised economic crime
departments (like the City of London
national ‘lead force’); SOCA; and generic
‘serious crime’ units and divisions in
individual forces. Some e-crime resources
are also used on frauds, although not as
many as on internet porn.
There is a larger number of
investigators in non-police agencies, who
interact with police mainly when they
need them for powers of arrest. There
are now also two privately funded police
units focused primarily on ‘organised’
volume fraud: (1) the Dedicated
Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit, a joint
City of London/Metropolitan Police
Unit established in 2002, and (2) the
34-strong Insurance Fraud Enforcement
Department, established in 2012 4 .
Within three general ‘strategic
objectives’ of awareness, prevention and
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