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Combating crime

In Finland the term combating crime refers to preventing, detecting and investigating crime as well as to referring the investigated cases to the prosecutor for consideration of charges.

Unlike many other countries, in Finland the police is mainly responsible for the whole process of the pre-trial investigation. Only when a policeman is suspected to have commited a crime, the investigation is led by a prosecutor. Also the Finnish Customs and The Finnish Border Guard are authorised to perform pre-trial investigations in their area of responsibility.

NBI focuses on organised crime
We in the National Bureau of Investigation carry out sophisticated, large-scale measures to combat crime. These include developing and improving methods to tackle crime, and providing training.

When investigating and preventing crime, we focus on:

• organised crime groups meeting the EU criteria
• the most serious forms of financial crime
• criminal cases requiring extensive international cooperation.

Main strategic lines in crime prevention
Our corner stones in combating organised crime are up-to-date situational awareness, produced on the basis of intelligence on organised and other serious crime gathered by various authorities, as well as targeted investigation based on that awareness, and cooperation with other competent authorities, both nationally and internationally.

Criminal targets, i.e. people and companies which surface from the situational awareness, are prioritised on the basis of their potential harm. Cases are then selected for criminal investigation and resources allocated for combating these systematically selected targets. Our specialist services in combating crime support the investigation.

In regard to organised crime groups, we apply all legal means to hamper their criminal activities. Members of these groups are a high priority for all law enforcement authorities, and the overall aim is also to detect and investigate even common crimes committed by such members. At the same time, more efficient monitoring produces criminal intelligence, which in turn is utilised to update the situational awareness.