Organised Crime

In one line

Organised crime is a continuing enterprise that supplies illegal goods and services or extracts money by force, and its distinguishing feature is not violence but organisation, corruption and continuity.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: organised crime was made an offence in the general penal law by section 111 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, which covers continuing unlawful activity including kidnapping, robbery, extortion, land grabbing, contract killing, economic offence and cyber-crime, committed by a syndicate as part of an organised crime syndicate; section 112 creates the separate offence of petty organised crime.

The characteristics

Six, and they are what distinguish organised crime from a group of people committing offences together.

Continuity. The enterprise survives the departure of any individual, including its leaders. This is the defining feature.

Structure and division of labour. Roles are differentiated: financiers, organisers, enforcers, transporters, disposers.

Corruption. An organised criminal enterprise cannot operate over time without the protection or acquiescence of some part of the administration, the police or the political system. This is why organised crime belongs in a paper whose third module is about official deviance: it is the point at which ordinary crime and privileged class deviance meet.

Supply of goods and services people want. Much organised crime is the provision of prohibited goods and services for which there is demand: narcotics, gambling, liquor under prohibition, unregulated finance. Prohibition creates the market and the profit.

Monopoly and the use of violence to preserve it. Violence is instrumental rather than expressive, and a well-established enterprise uses less of it, not more, because violence attracts attention.

And the investment of proceeds in legitimate business, which is where organised crime becomes indistinguishable from ordinary commerce and where money laundering enters.

The Indian legislative history

The Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act 1999 was the first serious Indian statute directed at the phenomenon, enacted against the background of organised extortion and contract killing in Mumbai. It introduced a definition of an organised crime syndicate, provided for the admissibility of confessions to senior police officers subject to safeguards, imposed stringent bail conditions and provided for the attachment of property. Its provisions and their interpretation are dealt with in the Penal Laws paper of this group, which prints it as a topic.

Other State legislation followed on similar lines.

And the Sanhita has now brought organised crime into the general penal law. Section 111 makes organised crime an offence, defining it by reference to continuing unlawful activity carried on by a person singly or jointly as a member of an organised crime syndicate or on its behalf, by use of violence, threat of violence, intimidation, coercion or other unlawful means, and listing kidnapping, robbery, vehicle theft, extortion, land grabbing, contract killing, economic offences, cyber-crimes and trafficking among its forms. Section 112 creates the offence of petty organised crime: whoever, being a member of a group or gang, either singly or jointly, commits any act of theft, snatching, cheating, unauthorised selling of tickets, unauthorised betting or gambling, selling of public examination question papers or any other similar criminal act. The Explanation makes clear that theft here includes trick theft, theft from a vehicle, dwelling house or business premises, cargo theft, pickpocketing, theft through card skimming, shoplifting and theft of an automated teller machine.