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100 crime gangs walk our streets
By Jeremy Roberts
November 3, 2004
ALMOST 100 organised crime gangs are operating in Australia and 10 of those pose
a serious threat to society.
The first audit of organised crime, by the Australian Crime Commission, has
uncovered a total of 97 organised crime groups in Australia.
ACC intelligence chief Kevin Kitson told an international policing conference
yesterday the top 10 groups had been deemed "high-threat" and posed a great
financial and violent risk to the community.
"It's clear that the top 10 organised crime groups do achieve a significant
financial return on their investments, they do impose threats of violence (and)
they do engage in corruption and intimidation," Mr Kitson told the International
Policing Conference 2004 in Adelaide.
The most hazardous groups are believed to include amphetamine drug producers,
outlaw bikie gangs, networks of firearms dealers, car "rebirthing" groups and
sexual exploitation outfits, plus identity theft and card-skimming groups that
specialise in stealing the codes from magnetic strips on credit cards.
Mr Kitson said the internet and high technology was equipping organised crime
groups with the ability to commit fraud at an unprecedented level - some
estimates putting the figure in Australia as high as $4 billion a year.
"At those figures it is rivalling the budgets of the Australian police forces
tasked with apprehending the groups," he said.
And he warned that card-skimming groups would shortly adapt technology from
overseas to pluck card information out of the air.
"They will move away from the relatively exposed forms of stealing the data to
taking the data from the transmission line from the point of sale," Mr Kitson
said.
The ACC audit was completed in September and was a first for the national body,
which formed last year to collect intelligence on nationally significant
criminal activity. It answers to a board made up of representatives from all
state and territory police forces, and the five federal police and intelligence
agencies.
Mr Kitson said the audit exposed the ACC to groups it did not know much about.
"Perhaps the most interesting part is not the 10 high-threat groups but the 87
medium, low and undetermined groups," he said.
"We know they have an international spread, we know they have links nationally,
we know they have some interest in illegal activity, (but) we don't know what
that is, and that presents a significant challenge for us."
While some groups were commonly identified using ethnic tags, such as the
"Russian mafia", Mr Kitson said this was misleading.
He said ethnic terms confused the public and did not reflect how such groups
operated. The ACC instead followed the "networks of relationships" between
individuals and groups.
"It's about the networked relationships and, while the links may not be hidden,
the money is undeclared," he said.
Another risk for Australia, given its prized disease-free status and strong
export trade, was environmental terrorism.
"Australia depends very greatly for its economic wealth on exports and it would
not take very much to damage that wealth if you had disease deliberately
introduced into this country," Mr Kitson said.
The Australian
