Digital Criminology as a Tool for Combating Organized Crime

Abstract

The starting point for the article is the growing importance of digital technologies in resolving the tasks of criminal policy. The authors present a definition of digitizing criminal policy: the introduction of quantitative methods of analyzing criminal phenomena and reacting to them (including the methods of mathematical statistics and mathematical modeling) in the practice of building and implementing a system of crime counteraction measures. They note that the low efficiency of criminal lawmaking mainly results from ignoring the necessity for a quantitative analysis of crime conditions, trends and the practice of crime counteraction. The authors stress that at present the decisions of lawmakers regarding the criminalization of organized criminal activities are not, as a rule, guided by the data of criminal statistics. The analysis of amendments to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation from 1997 toо 2017 shows that the growth in the number of articles of the Special Part of the Code that establish a greater responsibility for organized criminal activities (+77,5 %) was almost twice as high as the growth in the number of articles in its Special Part (+39,2 %). From the viewpoint of Russian legislators, the greatest degree of organized criminalization today is typical of crimes against the property (82 % of corresponding articles refer to the qualifying feature of being committed by an organized group), as well as crimes against sexual integrity and sexual freedom of a person (80 %). This position does not agree with the statistical data of the law enforcement work on identifying and investigating the activities of organized groups, or sentencing their participants. The authors also prove the necessity of developing a mathematical model for the new concept of criminal policy that should be based not on the momentary challenges or unexpected problems in law enforcement, but rather on the stable trends of changing criminal phenomena. They suggest devising a road map of criminal policy solutions that would ensure a gradual substitution of a repressive model of counteracting organized crime mainly based on the growth in the number of special criminal law prohibitions and law enforcement personnel by a prevention model of such counteraction. Today digital criminology has a real chance of becoming part of the practice of combating organized crime.