Behind the facade of European welfare
Criminal business as a "service industry"
Of particular concern to Ron Wainwright is cybercrime. This topic today is popular with officials and politicians. Some care about theft from bank accounts. Others - leaked confidential information. The head of Europol noted another aspect of the use of information technology, which is in service with criminal communities.
Recently, they have adapted for their communications open online platforms and an anonymous and secure part of the Internet - Darknet. These resources are not only messaging. Here you can contract for a criminal assignment, or vice versa - to find a performer.
Particularly active in this regard, drug traffickers. Europol, by the way, was originally created to coordinate the fight against drug trafficking. Later, the European Union police service was also charged with countering terrorism, illegal trade weapons, child pornography and money laundering.
However, until now the drug trade remains a major field of activity of Europol. It's not only in the past specialized European police service, but also on the scale of drug production and distribution. According to Ron Wainwright, more than a third of organized crime groups involved in drug trafficking. He makes a profit of the order of EUR 24 billion. Annually.
High income corresponds to and equipped criminals. At their disposal innovative chemical laboratories, which produce synthetic drugs, and modern means of delivery. Today, for the transportation of goods of criminal traffickers began to use drones.
The head of Europol commented on this news quite strange. He noted that now "crimes become part of the service industry." Wainwright is not the first to give such an assessment of the activities of the criminals. At one time, British Prime Minister David Cameron initiated the accounting of income from illegal business, including drug trafficking and prostitution, in the gross domestic product of the country.
The UK economy then did not look the best way. Manipulations with criminal incomes allowed the British government to maintain a level of GDP worthy of a developed country. It was three years ago. The Times newspaper, citing sources in the statistical agency, then estimated the UK prostitution market at 3 billion pounds per year, and the illegal drug trafficking - at 7 billion pounds. The cumulative increase in GDP was 10 billion pounds, or more than 16 billion US dollars.
Since then, accounting for criminal incomes in GDP has become the norm for EU countries. Now, as we see, they are already referred to the “part of the service industry”. In other words, the drug trade has become a business is business, and European values have grown in a new paradoxical concept. There is nothing surprising. In recent years, European politicians and officials are often silent about crimes in EU countries. This is especially true of offenses involving migrants. In this way, the visible well-being of the Union is maintained.
With his statement, Ron Wainwright showed the scale of the problem, and so that it would not torment the nerves of law-abiding Europeans, he presented the criminal business as a kind of benefit for the population - “part of the service sector”, equipped with modern drones.
With an ax to passengers
The German news agency DPA, commenting on the statement of the head of Europol, timidly remarked that in the EU countries "the number of traditional crimes - car thefts, fraud, money laundering, pick-pocketing" remains consistently high. The Agency modestly left behind the brackets of its specification the violent crimes.
Meanwhile, it is the violence, danger to life and health are concerned respectable burghers. In the evening of the same day, when the head of Europol in The Hague made his sensational statement at the train station in Düsseldorf, an immigrant from Kosovo with an ax chased after people. The four victims were hospitalized with serious injuries.
The police managed to apprehend the villain. Running from his pursuers, he jumped off the bridge and broke his legs. Authorities declared a detainee skorenko crazy and locked up in a psychiatric hospital. A similar case occurred last summer in Bavaria. There's a young refugee from Afghanistan passengers smashed the ax right in the car commuter train. The local media have written about 21 wounds, but police denied this information. Authorities said the five injured, three of whom suffered serious injuries.
At that time, the guests from Asia were not declared crazy. He was just shot while being detained. It happens that criminals avoid punishment. It happened in the already mentioned Düsseldorf on Friday. Here an unknown man attacked with passers-by with a machete. “When attacking in Düsseldorf, two Italian women were slightly injured. This is an aunt with a niece from Bergamo, ”the newspaper La Repubblica quotes the words of the Italian consul in Cologne, Emilio Lolli. The Germans, as usual, give more soothing data. According to the Bild newspaper, only one person was hospitalized with serious injuries - a man. The attacker managed to escape.
German authorities call violence cases “single crimes”. So for society creates the appearance of well-being, behind the facade of which only official statistics account, for example, thousands of rapes (in Bild, a figure close to 4000 was called). In this sense, the French are more outspoken. In their press, the criminal activities of gangs, which Ron Wainwright outlined by dry statistics, are sometimes described in some detail.
Last year, the Analytical Department of Police Judiciaire (“Judicial Police”) noted an increase in the number and activation of organized criminal groups, primarily ethnic - Kosovo, Romanian, Bulgarian, Baltic, African, Latin American, Chinese, Russian-speaking, and so on.
Home-grown criminals are not considered by the French as organized groups. Although five years ago, the newspaper Le Figaro, citing the secret report of the “Judicial Police”, which deals with the fight against organized crime, wrote about more than 20 criminal territorial communities. Since then, official information of this kind has not been made publicly available, and organized criminal groups of the media now qualify as ethnic.
Among them there are not too noisy criminal community involved money laundering, fraud real estate, organization of clandestine betting and other illegal business. There are groups whose crimes occur in the society mind openly. They are particularly common in the southern port cities of the country, for example, in Marseille.
One time is to clean the city from the gangsters even planned military operation. Then change your mind. Last year, the demonstrative showdown gangsters with machine-gun shooting and car chases in Marseille happened almost every week. According to police, in the disassembly of the year killed nearly 30 people. Approximately the same number counted the wounded.
Arsenal gangsters serious. During the war in Kosovo, they took away a million firearms from military stores. Now they profit from the Albanian mafia. In France, the Kalashnikov assault rifle, she sells an average of thousands of euros for 2,5. Price - available by local standards. According to prosecutors who investigated the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, it was the Albanians who sold the guns to terrorists through a German intermediary.
Similar examples can be found in other European countries, but local politicians and officials are trying to get their attention. Tom two reasons. Firstly, a people may not really notice the criminal activities of criminal community, if it is silent about the media. For politicians it is the benefit: fewer complaints from voters to the obvious failures in the work of the authorities.
Secondly, for many years Europe has shaped the image of a prosperous society in the world, a sort of role model for other countries. Now it is difficult for her to admit that, for example, African or Latin American gangs behave in European cities exactly the same way as in Brazilian São Paulo or Nigerian Lagos. Do not lag behind them and homegrown gangsters, which really does not fit into the "European values".
Europeans have a lot to think about. Anyway, crime is still socially rooted. The more unstable the world becomes in which the criminal world exists, the more freely all these criminal groups and communities feel. So the diseases of today's Europe caused such an intensification of crime that the head of Europol Ron found it necessary to show the scale of this problem. Wainwright still could not resist and prudently camouflaged part of the crimes under the "service industry". The head of Europol did not dare to shock European society so much ...
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