Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

POLICING CHALLENGES
“In a climate of private and public
sector spending cuts, we may lose
sight of the harm that frauds can do.”
enforcement, the NFA report Fighting
Fraud Together proposed better use of
intelligence, collaboration and crosscutting
initiatives, with “law enforcement
and other partners increasing the risk of
disruption and punishment to organised
and opportunistic fraudsters, thus
deterring potential criminal offenders,”
(p17).
A Joint Serious and Organised Crime
Assessment Centre (within the National
Crime Agency) will have an “intelligence
sharing architecture” to provide
fraud data to promote awareness and
prevention, the identification of networks
of organised fraud domestically and
internationally, and asset recovery,
while the NCA Economic Crime
Command would address constraints
on police resources by developing
“innovative, partnership solutions
working across police forces, the NCA
other law enforcement organisations
and the public, private and voluntary
sectors,” (p20).
Technological advances in data linking
fuzzy-matching software have shown
that what would previously have been
seen as isolated frauds or legitimate
losses, are actually part of an ‘organised’
network, for example between accident
management companies, car hire firms,
valuers, and a pool of people willing if
asked to make false claims for whiplash
and other injuries, implicitly because they
do not regard this is as seriously immoral.
In around a third of OCGs, links
between fraud and other crimes have
been shown via the OCG Mapping
exercise. Collectively, taking into account
the range of force areas in which victims
of mass marketing scams live as well as
where OCG offenders live, these indicate
the need for inter-force liaison and
investigative resources if they are going to
be dealt with properly.
The City of London Police Economic
Crime Directorate has been expanded
with government help, and houses the
National Fraud Intelligence Bureau,
whose main functions are: (1) the analysis
of fraud data from law enforcement
and other sectors, and Action Fraud, for
onward distribution as intelligence leads
to law enforcement agencies nationally,
including the police; and (2) the analysis
of patterns and trends, in terms of
volume and value of fraud, and mapping
by type, level and victims.
Action Fraud, hosted by the NFA,
will receive nationally all fraud
complaints (including those initially
made to individual police forces). Central
government is also funding for three years
a number of regional fraud and fraud
intelligence teams, linked to the regional
Tasking processes, as a regional resource
from 2012 and 2013. These teams are
designed to proactively investigate those
organised crime groups involved in fraud
and will bring additional resource rather
than replace divisional or specialised
detectives.
Better use can be made of Suspicious
Transaction Reports from bankers,
lawyers, etc, but even now, fraud is
merely one major example of the
imbalance between the supply of
‘intelligence packages’ and operational
capacity to act on them. However,
inevitably there will be many frauds –
some of them very large indeed, and
outside the M25 – that will not be picked
up by intelligence-led policing because
they are not linked to those sources,
and cannot plausibly be dealt with by
disruption or prevention.
In 2010 the City of London Police and
the SFO were between them responsible
for two-thirds of the value of live cases
being investigated by Counter Fraud
Strategy Forum members. Only one in
seven recorded frauds led to a conviction;
a substantial proportion were not
investigated even before cutbacks.
Overall, fraud resources are in
decline, to some extent being replaced
by financial investigators for the also
worthwhile task of examining generic
offenders’ assets.
A rare exception to this trend resulted
from Greater Manchester Police’s (GMP)
use of priority-based budgeting. An
internal business case was developed that
fraud investigations, particularly lowervalue
frauds, were being inefficiently
and inexpertly conducted within general
detective caseloads across various
divisions.
Externally validated by a Big 4
accounting firm, GMP centralised a
number of officers from divisions within
its Economic Crime section to operate
both a major fraud and volume fraud
unit. All cases are evaluated, with an
emphasis on vulnerable victims, repeat
offenders, professional fraudsters and
cross-force links.
Both units draw on the section’s
intelligence and financial investigations
units. Levels of expertise, case
completion, cost savings and staff
divisional availability for front-line
policing priorities have all increased.
This looks promising. However, in
a climate of private and public sector
spending cuts, we may lose sight of
the harm that frauds can do and the
importance of both individual and
collective effort in reducing them.
The private sector will fill in the gap
for those corporations and agencies
willing and able to fund them, but most
consumer and investment frauds, and
insolvency frauds, rely on police action
both to help get money back and to
ensure at least some level of deterrence
and just desserts.
1
www.cps.gov.uk/legal/d_to_g/fraud_act/
2
www.homeoffice.gov.ukpublicationsagencies-publicbodiesnfanational-fraud-segmentationviewBinary
3
www.cas.org.uksystemfilespublicationscrimes-ofpersuasion.pdf
4
www.cityoflondon.police.ukCityPoliceDepartments
ECD/IFED/
POLICING UK | 97