NCJ Number
176385
Editor(s)
P Panayi
Date Published
1996
Length
238 pages
Annotation
The 10 essays in this collection focus on the history of racial violence in modern Britain from 1840 to the present.
Abstract
"Cross-border crime" is characterized by an offender crossing a police-force boundary to perpetrate a crime or commit an offense in such a way as to require the police to cross boundaries to investigate it. The study conducted three surveys and a series of interviews to measure the extent of cross-border crime and assess the current methods of dealing with it. There was a survey of detected crime, a survey of serious crime investigations, and a survey of police squads' operations. All of the surveys pertained to crimes detected from April 1, 1994, to March 31, 1995. The study found that the majority of police forces currently have significant difficulty in quantifying the extent to which cross-border crime occurs in their jurisdictions. Nationally, 10 percent of detected crime is cross-border, and most of this is inter-force, i.e., criminals offending in a force that adjoins the one in which they live. Rates of cross-border offending vary significantly among forces; forces that adjoin or are reasonably close to large metropolitan areas and those that attract large numbers of tourists experience rates of cross- border offending of up to 23 percent of all detected crime. Measured in numbers of operations conducted, 43 percent of force squads' operations involve cross-border crime. Informal regional groups have arisen on an ad-hoc basis to provide intelligence on cross-border offenders whose crimes warrant particular attention. One recommendation from this study is that police forces improve their measurement of the extent and nature of cross-border crime in their areas; this can be done with the Phoenix database, force crime recording systems, local crime analysis, the DNA and fingerprint databases, and analysis of informants' and intelligence reports. Further, there should be more inter-force cooperation in addressing cross-border crime. Forces should consider formalizing the regular sharing of information on known offenders, appointing inter-force liaison officers, setting up short-term exchanges of officers, and mounting more joint operations. 9 tables and 13 references