The Organized Crime – from a Threat to the Risk

Abstract

Organized crime has become an extremely powerful concept that underlies many different policies for combatting it. A lot of countries, sensitive to the problem, are investing considerable resources – legislative, institutional, financial and human – in order to counter this phenomenon. However, then the question arises as to what they direct their efforts against, what they take into account, how they perceive organized crime. Legislative actions most often go through the creation of specialized institutional instruments (investigative structures or specialized courts), through which it is assumed that the fight against this type of crime would be more successful and effective. Before proceeding to specific institutional and structural-determining actions, however, it is important for each of the countries to determine how they perceive this social problem. Not so much from a conceptual point of view, but from a strategic point of view – whether as a threat, whether as a risk or as something else. Depending on this, policies to control and limit the level of organized crime would have a different focus. This text aims to illustrate precisely that perceiving this type of non-conventional crime as a risk reverses the institutional thinking and from reactive, it should become more preventive.