Law enforcement activities of subjects of crime prevention

Polikarpova Irina Vladimirovna PhD in Law Docent, the department of Criminal and Penal Law, Saratov State Law Academy 410056, Russia, Saratovskaya oblast', g. Saratov, ul. Ul.vol'skaya, 1 ir-polikarpova@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Zaitseva Olesya Viktorovna PhD in Law Docent, the department of Criminal and Penal Law, Saratov State Law Academy 410056, Russia, Saratovskaya oblast', g. Saratov, ul. Vol'skaya, 1 zaitseva.о@bk.ru Other publications by this author

An important strategic vector of the state policy in the field of combating crime is the strengthening of law and order, ensuring state and public security, including through the exercise by law enforcement officers of their powers in the field of crime prevention. Of course, the results of this activity significantly affect the improvement of the criminological situation in the country as a whole, and in the regions in particular, therefore, first of all, it is necessary to intensify work in this direction using all the necessary tools of criminological prevention provided for by preventive legislation. However, the preventive activity of the subjects of prevention reveals a number of serious problems affecting its quality.

In 2021, we conducted a monitoring study in three regions of the Russian Federation (Saratov, Penza and Tambov regions) concerning the problems of the formation of Russian crime prevention legislation, during which 200 respondents were interviewed-law enforcement officers, of which 23.5% - employees of the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, 23.5% - the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia, 53% - employees of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation, as well as 20 doctors of law in the specialty 12.00.08, of which 50% are Honored Scientists of the Russian Federation and Honored Lawyers of the Russian Federation.

The conducted research has shown that the law enforcement activities of the subjects of crime prevention are still ineffective. Thus, the crime rate over the past 5 years, i.e. since the adoption of the Federal Law "On the Basics of the system of crime Prevention in the Russian Federation" (2016) ^[5] (hereinafter – the Federal Law on Crime Prevention) in the Volga Federal District decreased by 2.3%, in Russia – by 0.3%, which is active an indicator of the crisis of the existing crime prevention system.

Using the author's methodology for measuring the effectiveness of law enforcement activities in the field of crime prevention, the coefficient of effectiveness of preventive activities of participants in preventive legal relations was revealed, which in the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation was 0.27; in the prosecutor's office – 0.42; in the bodies of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia – 0.11; people's squads and other associations of preventive orientation – 0.08. In general, the effectiveness of crime prevention activities was assessed by law enforcement officers as satisfactory (3.7 points on a five-point scale), and the experts, who were the leading criminologists of the country, were unsatisfactory (2.4 points).  

The rather low productivity of criminological prevention is largely due, on the one hand, to the quality of preventive legislation, gaps and shortcomings in the legal regulation of the practical activities of the relevant subjects, and, on the other, to historically developed defects in legal implementation techniques, a bias towards formal law enforcement and repressive practices.

We will demonstrate this thesis with the results of our empirical research. In total, 60% of respondents noted that they were faced with a situation where it was impossible to take measures within their powers to eliminate the causes and conditions of crimes / offenses due to the lack of necessary legal regulation. Among the shortcomings and gaps of the current criminological legislation affecting the quality of law enforcement activities in the field of crime prevention and law enforcement, the respondents named: a) the uncertainty of the regulation of the mechanism for the implementation of certain forms of preventive impact (in particular, social adaptation and social rehabilitation) (64% of respondents); b) the lack of clear legislative criteria for specific deadlines for their implementation and the grounds for their use (16.3%); c) incompleteness of the list of subjects of prevention (24.5%); d) imperfection of the regulatory framework governing the procedure for determining the size and boundaries of the administrative area of the district police commissioner (15.5%); e) lack of legal grounds for the application of administrative coercion measures to persons in public places in a state of alcoholic, narcotic or other toxic intoxication, including the delivery of these persons to the duty stations of the internal affairs bodies, or premises in medical organizations (12.7%), etc. For example, issues concerning the criteria and grounds for the preventive registration of certain categories of citizens, including parents or other legal representatives of minors, have not yet been properly fixed in federal legislation and in departmental rulemaking, which negatively affects law enforcement practice, leads to arbitrary interpretation of legislative provisions by subjects of prevention ^{[4, 7]}.

It should be noted that not all preventive measures provided for in Article 17 of the Federal Law on the Prevention of Offenses are actively used in law enforcement activities. According to the data we have obtained, of the ten forms of preventive influence, the most repressive ones are most often used in practice: preventive conversations (more than 80% of respondents); making representations about detected violations of the law, about eliminating the causes and conditions that contribute to the commission of an offense (56%); announcing an official warning about the inadmissibility of actions that create conditions for the commission of violations (55%); preventive records and preventive supervision (46% each). Extremely rarely in their practical activities, law enforcement officers use such non-repressive measures of influence as social adaptation and rehabilitation (about 20%), resocialization (about 20%); assistance to persons who have suffered from offenses or are at risk of becoming such (6.8%). As a result of the expanded use of repressive forms of preventive influence, punitive-administrative and socio-preventive practices are mixed, while the nature and essence of the latter are actually leveled. 

Such frequent use of "sanctions measures" of preventive impact can be explained by the functional specifics of the subjects of such law enforcement activities, which, first of all, include law enforcement agencies initially focused on the police-punitive content of their activities. We see the way out of this situation in the creation of a new body, whose main task will be only the implementation of preventive activities.

The next point that needs to be paid attention to and which also significantly affects the quality of law enforcement practice is the declarativeness of many provisions of legislative acts. For example, Part 3 of Article 20 of the Federal Law On the Prevention of Offenses states that in case of non-fulfillment of the requirements specified in the official warning, the person against whom it was issued is liable in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation. However, the types of such liability are not provided for by any regulatory legal act. We believe that such declarativeness largely generates a formal approach of the relevant subjects to the implementation of these norms in practice. In this regard, the proposals of individual authors on the need to provide for appropriate liability measures in the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation seem justified. At the same time, we share the opinion of these authors that "responsibility for such offenses should be quite severe with a high amount of penalties and provide for such a measure of administrative punishment as administrative arrest" ^{[3, p. 24]}.

A certain declarativeness is also seen in such a form of preventive impact as assistance to persons who have suffered from offenses or are at risk of becoming such (Article 27 of the Federal Law on the Prevention of Offenses). The implementation of this form is currently legally regulated only in one case, when it comes to helping victims of terrorist attacks. Thus, Article 18 of Federal Law No. 35-FZ of March 6, 2006 "On Countering Terrorism" establishes that compensation payments can be made to individuals and legal entities who have suffered damage as a result of a terrorist act ^[6]. However, in other cases, for example, when committing a number of violent crimes, including in the family and household sphere, criminological legislation does not provide any social, psychological, medical support. Thus, it can be stated that at present the considered form of preventive action is not fully implemented in the practical activities of the subjects of prevention. In this regard, we consider it necessary to eliminate declarativity in this case by establishing legal and other assistance to victims of violent crimes, including victims of domestic violence.

Among the topical issues of application of legislation on the prevention of crime are the following: a) the lack of necessary material and technical basis for implementation of a number of authorities in the field of crime prevention (e.g., in the Tambov and Saratov regions are no terminals for emergency contact "Citizen police" in the Penza region has only one terminal; no specialized organizations to assist persons in public places in a state of alcoholic, narcotic or other intoxication (the sobering-up stations); due to the rapidly expanding new neighbourhoods significant part of the population of the regional centers is not in walking distance to provincial police; requires improvement system auto-commit offences, etc.; b) they are overworked, prevention is often simply do not have time (which confirms the 41% of respondents); C) low level of coordination and interaction among the various actors of prevention, "everyone is cooked in its own juice" (for example, medical institutions do not provide information on individuals suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction, a district police officer of the police outside of the criminal case, in virtue of which the latter are unable to fully carry out individual prevention in respect of this category of citizens); g) lack of special knowledge and skills of law enforcement officers (e.g., for preventive conversations district police officer of police must possess psychological knowledge, mediation technologies, etc.); d) the imperfection of the performance of prevention work, which is built on the basis of the "cane" of the system of departmental estimates.

In particular, the effectiveness of preventive measures directly depends on the level of interaction between the subjects of prevention. However, we have to state that the level of such interaction remains at a very low level today. There is also practically no activity currently underway to attract citizens to the protection of public order, which is due to the introduction of restrictive measures in connection with the spread of a new coronavirus infection, as well as a lack of funding. Various solutions to the issues of improving the coordination of the activities of various entities have been repeatedly proposed in the literature. For example, some authors propose to solve the problem of interaction between individual subjects of prevention by, for example, "amending Article 13 "Bodies carrying out operational investigative activities" of Federal Law No. 144-FZ of August 12, 1995 "On operational investigative activities", as well as the adoption of interdepartmental joint orders on the interaction of investigative the Committee of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia and the Prosecutor's Office" ^{[2, p. 494]}.

From our point of view, the creation of a unified information system that allows all prevention services to see the work of each unit in relation to the persons being prevented could significantly improve the interaction between the various subjects of prevention.

So, for example, if a teenager is placed on preventive registration, then preventive measures with these persons begin to be carried out not only by juvenile affairs units, but also by other subjects of prevention, for example, educational authorities that provide individual work with a minor and his family. But at the same time, these bodies and departments often do not know what activities are being carried out with this teenager. This leads to the fact that a teenager, with insufficient primary preventive measures carried out by only one subject of prevention, namely an educational institution, commits an offense or a crime ^{[1, p. 25]}.  Therefore, the creation of a unified information base will contribute to a comprehensive preventive effect in order to prevent the commission of crimes and offenses.

So, the identified shortcomings and gaps allowed us to identify the main directions for improving the law enforcement practice of subjects of preventive activities:

1. Elimination of imperfections in the regulatory framework regulating the activities of prevention subjects, as well as bringing departmental regulations in accordance with federal legislation in order to exclude contradictions to the provisions contained in the basic preventive laws.

2. Conducting continuous monitoring not only aimed at analyzing, summarizing and evaluating regulatory legal acts of a preventive orientation, but also at studying the state of implementation of the current norms of preventive legislation.

3. Elimination of declarativeness of certain social and preventive measures, which are either not applied at all in law enforcement activities, or are applied, but formally, for reporting of relevant entities.

4. Expanding the use of non-repressive preventive measures in order to prevent the mixing of criminal-repressive activities and social-preventive activities.

5. Improving the mechanism of interaction between all subjects of prevention. In order to increase the level of such interaction, it is necessary to create a unified information base that provides a comprehensive preventive effect.

These proposals have found their empirical confirmation in the complex of our studies. In addition, two-thirds of respondents indicated the need to codify criminological legislation, which will finally form preventive law as an independent legal branch.