Britain wants FBI-style force
2004-03-29 20:38
London - The British government, determined to crack down on drug trafficking, people smuggling and fraud, unveiled its blueprints on Monday for a new, FBI-style police force to tackle organised crime.
The elite Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca), staffed with 5 000 specialist officers, should be up and running by 2006, according to a strategy paper from Home Secretary David Blunkett.
Other measures would include, for the first time, plea bargaining for gangsters who turn against their bosses, and the admissibility in court of taped phone calls and intercepted e-mails.
"I am now convinced that every means at our disposal should be examined in order to get what is now a cross-boundary international scourge tackled," Blunkett said on BBC radio.
"We are talking here about sophisticated, organised criminality on a massive scale," he said.
The strategy paper, "One Step Ahead," put the cost of organised crime in Britain at £40bn a year, or three times the GDP of Luxembourg, the richest EU state in per capita terms.
Soca is to combine the talents of the agencies that already deal with organised crime in Britain - the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the investigative arms of Customs and Excise and the immigration service.
Its broad sweep has prompted comparisons with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its creation is billed as the biggest change in the structure of British policing in four decades.
Blunkett's strategy paper was also to call for changes to British law so that wiretapped phone calls and monitored e-mail can be used as evidence in court against alleged gangsters.
"What we want to do is to refine what we mean by using intercepts, in what circumstances, so that we don't damage our intelligence services internationally," he explained on BBC radio.
Another proposed change is the introduction of plea bargaining, so that gangsters who turn themselves in to police can look forwards to reduced sentences in return for testifying in court against their bosses.
Jan Berry, chairperson of the Police Federation, told BBC radio that so-called "supergrasses" should be encouraged to come forward, but added that victims must be seen to be given priority in any prosecution.