Transnational policing is most frequently quoted as a solution to organized crime. Organized crime is a global phenomenon beyond the scope of any one agency or jurisdiction to deal with alone. So cooperation, international law enforcement, mutual legal assistance and transnational criminal investigation and knowledge or information helps to control the risk of such crime across the world. The capacity to communicate around the world has radically increased through personal computers and mobile telephone and opens up new possibilities for horizontal communication and collaboration among police officers in the field. Organized crime as its name indicate, illegal activity which is done by the coordination of more than one country criminals and therefore, to tackle it successfully, police need to seek cooperation partners across borders to share intelligence, coordinate operations, secure evidence, and track down suspects. In general the main cause of the development of transnational policing is due to the increased problem of transnational organized crime and terrorism across countries from time to time.
The Purpose of the Review
The main purpose of this article review is to examine the influence of transnational policing on organized crime and its development in international context.
The General Overview of the Articles and Its Critics
When the world is becoming economically, politically, socially and technologically connected and, then organized crime becomes beyond the competence of the traditional criminal justice investigative agencies such as police forces and customs agencies and the national government also unable to control it by itself (Ben Bowling, 2009). And it follows, therefore, that collaborative and coordinated effort is required to translate different and differing national capacities and capabilities into an effective multilateral mechanism against organized crime and establish policing in its international context is an obligatory (Clive Harfield, 2008).
In the world police officers share a distinctive attitude and their job is well established. In any one police organization there is no single police culture; they share a set of assumptions, values, modes of thinking, and acting. Perceptions of occupational commonality are nowadays reinforced by the widely shared conviction that police forces must cooperate if they are to respond effectively to the crime and insecurity facilitated by globalization and form intergovernmental organizations such as European Union and Interpol with shared professional standards to tackle organized crime across countries (Alice Hills, 2009).
Transnational policing in the past decade was neither well organized nor systematized and policing on organized crime is an ambitious. The co-operative development has been connected to the post 9/11 responses in the so-called war on terror that have reinforced the context of collaboration amongst certain partner nations. It is characterized by defensive in its widest sense. However, todays transnational policing is highly planned, coordinated, systematized and transnational networks have become more extensive, intensive and faster flowing, global forces are having a greater local impact (Clive Harfield, 2008).
In general, the current transnational policing develops itself through different mechanisms such as in the light of UN peacekeeping, by developing National Intelligence Model which helps to apply intelligence led policing to collect and evaluate information and problem oriented policing to analysis, identify the problem and effective use of resources, and by connecting the local, the national and international police based on the concept of threat and harm, rather than geography (Hills, Harfield, Bowling and Gilmour).
Even if today’s transnational policing is highly organized, coordinated, technologically advanced and shift its nature from time to time; in my critical point of view for I see no such convinced evidence of such cooperation’s of transnational policing practically reduce the risk of organized crime because its inhuman consequences increases from time to time and it is also a conspiracy of the states and a business for many states, its influence goes forever unless they stop their political conspiracy as well as egoist interests. Indeed my assessment relies on subjective evidence, rather than a systematic evidential basis, but so, too, do the claims made on behalf of transnational policing.
In addition in my stand, using policing models especially zero tolerance policing model can play a great role in controlling organized crime in combination with other models.
The methodologies which were used by authors when they prepared the articles is Qualitative method that are: Descriptive, explanatory and normative design to understand transnational policing practices and sketch out an agenda, Descriptive design to describe the developments of transnational policing in different decades, Case study to discuss the problems associated with a crime management model and Explanatory design to offer an explanation of transnational policing limitations based on the primacy of sub state practice over international standards (Hills, Harfield, Bowling and Gilmour).
The methodologies they used were correct, but in my stand for the purpose of deep understanding, to discover and describe the culture of organized criminal groups and assist us greater insight into organized crime, it is better to use ethnographic research design study.
In general the articles assessed the development of transnational policing in the past decades and todays, the way it develops, the information it uses and it’s changing due to increasing global criminal activity.
My argument is that even if indeed, there is a great change in different ways, its effectiveness is on question mark, because organized crime becomes beyond its capacity and still debatable.
These articles review policing in international context by showing the experiences of different countries across the world in combination and or the experiences of the nations, taken as an example to apply in other countries. In general, the articles analyzed policing at international, national and local context then coordinate each other to tackle organized crime.
The major questions rose by the authors: What are reasonable conditions in the coordination of organized crime policing? What are prerequisites of policing of organized crime in international context? What are problems associated to crime management model and the merits of different models of policing that work to counter transnational organized crime? To what extent the coordination of transnational policing can be effective and efficient at all nations? How to link local policing activity with the effort to tackle national and transnational criminality? And the perspectives used by authors include social constructive perspective, community perspective, human right perspective, and national and international perspectives (Hills, Harfield, Bowling and Gilmour).
In my understanding the articles undergo with some weaknesses: explanations of transnational policing mostly focused on the experience of power full states, the articles mostly explored reactive measures to control organized crime, and the articles are not clearly show the effectiveness of the coordination of policing of organized crime and the coordination mostly focused on police organization, it should be consider other sectors.
Conclusion
The world becomes full of challenges, policing needs to solve such challenges through cooperation and coordination with different concerned bodies’ especially international crimes should need an integrated system of transnational policing. In the past decades transnational policing was not as much coordinated to tackle organized crime but the modern transnational policing are highly organized, coordinated and systematized but its effectiveness is not such satisfactory. Generally, the articles were extensively focused on the coordination and cooperation of transnational policing in different ways in order to block organized crime across different countries. While in addition to this; the future researchers will first identify the root causes and pushing factors that leads to commit organized crime and try to devise strategies to prevent it before the commission unless the world might become under the control of it. Generally, transnational policing is a basic instrument to tackle organized crime.
Recommendation
It is recommended that Organized Crime is a risk for every one or every nation forever, so adopting common criminal code should be homework for the world or each nation and researchers should show this gap every time which is obstacle to apply transnational policing in coordination to reduce the risk of such serious crime. It is recommended that future research will be focused on creating trust between the states that the issues is not a political rather security. The transnational policing should be held as a policy in every nation to address issues rose by organized crime and employed highly intellectual individuals will be preserved.
References
Alice Hills, (2009). The Possibility of Transnational Policing, Policing and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy, 19:3, 300-317, DOI:10.1080/10439460902871363
Ben Bowling, (2009). Transnational Policing: The Globalization Thesis, a Typology and a Research Agenda London CSF Associates: Publius, Inc.
Clive Harfield, (2008). The Organization of Organized Crime Policing and Its International Context Australia SAGE Publications.
Stan Gilmour & Robert France, (2011). Local policing and transnational organized crime, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 25:1-2, 17-26, DOI:10.1080/13600869.2011.594644