A comprehensive study of latent crime is one of the most important and incompletely studied tasks in criminology today. It entails a number of negative consequences, which include the impossibility of an adequate assessment of the general level of real crime and the organization of a worthy fight against it. In addition, this crime, no doubt, distorts the true statistical picture. This problem increases the risk of developing the most serious forms of latent crime; because of latency, citizens' distrust of law enforcement agencies is growing, legal nihilism is developing, and the level of legal consciousness is decreasing. In addition to everything else, the degree of responsibility of law enforcement agencies, whose employees consider it quite possible to choose what types of crimes to deal with and which to let it go, decreases.
Definition of a concept
The concept of "latent crime" defines the hidden part of crimes already committed in real time. Opinions of experts about what crimes should be considered latent vary. Some refer to such acts only those that remained unknown to law enforcement agencies. However, some of the crimes simply do not fall into the field of statistics for any other reason. One cannot but take them into account. Thus, this type of crime is most correctly attributed to all acts that are not included in official statistics.
Types of Latent Crime
There are several different classification methods. The first is directly related to the conditions (causes) of the occurrence of hidden crimes. The following types of latent crime are distinguished as the main ones:
- Natural (objectively existing). Crimes are highlighted here, which the law enforcement authorities simply did not know for one reason or another (peculiarities of the crimes themselves, failure of their investigation, etc.). These types of crimes include primarily those that were simply not reported to the police.
- Artificial (subjectively determined). This mainly includes the types of crimes known to the police, but hidden from statistics by individual officials for one reason or another.
- Borderline. We are talking about crimes not registered due to deficiencies in the accounting system, as well as the so-called refusal material: some acts that are socially dangerous in fact, but not unintentionally recognized as such, and fiction, due to the initially incorrect legal interpretation of the corpus delicti with the aim of not recognizing it publicly dangerous act.
Level
Detection of latent crime is the most important task of law enforcement agencies. Estimates of experts on the question of what is the approximate number of latent socially dangerous acts vary. Of course, most of the hidden ones are undeclared crimes. However, all experts agree that they are an order of magnitude greater than the solved or at least recorded crimes. The total share of latent crime worldwide is more than half of the actual violations of the law. In Russia, the share of such crimes, according to various estimates, is different and in the ratio with the recorded is from 6: 1 to 10: 1. It is known for certain that in certain types of crimes the conditional degree of lateness is even close to seventy percent. However, the real scale is almost impossible to establish.
Additional views
Let us single out a few more classifications of latent crime. Latency:
- generally;
- certain types of crime;
- specific crimes;
- criminals.
According to the degree and level, latent acts are distinguished:
- minimally - almost completely reflected in the statistics;
- medium;
- as much as possible - never actually falling into official statistics.
The minimally latent specialists include crimes related to terrorism. It also includes killings, hostage-taking and robbery.
Crimes with an average degree of latency - robberies, thefts, violent acts of a sexual nature (and all the articles accompanying them, as well as similar crimes).
The most latent, which is not surprising, are criminal acts related to corruption (bribery), extortion and fraud, environmental crimes (for example, illegal hunting). Also included is the illegal possession and distribution of drugs and weapons.
Causes of Latent Crime
With a more thorough analysis of the issue, about 50 really existing reasons for the appearance of the phenomenon under consideration arise. However, we will try to combine them into blocks that are wider in their semantic load:
- Reasons of an ideological nature. It's no secret that today the authorities are actively fighting to reduce crime in order to slightly reduce the degree of public unrest and the activity of citizens in this matter (rallies, demonstrations, pedaling of topics in the media and so on). It is precisely with this that specialists associate the emergence of some part of latent crimes. However, of course, their number is far from the final one.
- Defects in organizational work. This block of reasons does not require particularly deep disclosure, since it includes all the imperfections in the system for registering and recording criminal acts.
- Social Psychology. Yes, yes, often crimes simply remain unknown to law enforcement agencies due to the fact that citizens themselves do not dare to report them to the police. This choice has a whole range of reasons, primarily psychological in nature: shame, unwillingness to publicize, distrust of the authorities, fear of possible revenge, sometimes because of their legal incompetence, people don’t understand at all that there was a crime.
- Lack of professional staff. This block of causes is directly related to deficiencies in the organizational work of bodies. The small number of personnel in comparison with the number of crimes committed over a certain period of time makes the prospect of a thorough processing of the material of all criminal acts impossible.
- The specifics of crimes. The features of some socially dangerous, at first glance, acts make them beneficial to both parties. An ideal example for understanding this block of causes is represented by crimes related to corruption. None of the parties to the amicable contract is interested in publicity (unless, of course, this was a specially modeled share).
Assessment Methods
Latent crime and methods for assessing it are important tasks of law enforcement agencies that they are constantly solving. So, conditionally all methods can be conditionally divided into two groups: sociological and operational-investigative. Let's consider them in more detail.
Sociological
The first group, you guessed it, includes all sociological techniques. The most widely used sociological surveys of allegedly “hidden” victims. Such polls, of course, cannot bring one hundred percent true result, but with their help it is possible to determine the regional ratio of detected and latent crime, to understand what are the motives for concealing socially dangerous acts, to identify the types of crime most susceptible to concealment, and to establish the circumstances that determine this. This also includes the analysis of media content related to the topic being studied.
Operational investigative
The second group of methods includes those that are used exclusively in law enforcement agencies.
The method of expert assessments, as well as polls, is widely used in parsing, however, if we relate it to the operational-investigative options for determining latent crime, only the opinion of specialists formally actively interacting with the authorities should be taken into account.
Extensive study of failed materials. As mentioned earlier, it is precisely the failure materials that make up a number of reasons for the appearance of such a phenomenon as latency in the field of crime. That is why their study has already become an integral part of operational investigative activities.
The study of materials from hospitals and forensic medical examinations. Comparison of data from medical institutions with those received in the investigative circulation allows us to roughly estimate how many crimes were hidden.
As a mini-result on methods of assessing latency in the criminal sphere, it should be noted that the traditional sociological survey (here we also include analysis) still seems to specialists the most popular and, most importantly, effective method.
A very interesting and controversial method for determining latent crime is to induce potential criminals to give a confession, that is, to confess. Often, this option is condemned by society from the point of view of morality and ethics, primarily because the investigation does not always indicate the person really guilty of a criminal act. However, an important factor in the formation of such a perception of this method are detective films and series that reveal this topic in a negative way. Another very controversial method is to check the correspondence of convicts coming from prison to freedom and in the opposite direction. It is carried out in order to identify accomplices in the commission of a criminal act. Letters or other correspondence may include signs that directly or indirectly indicate them.
Case Study History
The first to pay attention to the problem of latent crime in the sixties of the twentieth century were criminologists A. A. Herzenzon, A. S. Shlyapochnikov, N. N. Kondrashkov, F. M. Zakharevich. The last scientist was seriously studying statistics. F. M. Zakharevich in one of his works noted:
The increase in the number of crimes that appear in the statistical table is often only an expression of the best system adopted to open them. The number of prisoners handed over to justice is not yet a means sufficient for the number of crimes truly committed, just as the number of fish caught by the net does not indicate the number of fish swimming in the river ...
However, a really deep and comprehensive study of the problem of latency in crime began only a decade later, in the seventies of the twentieth century. It was then that scientists began to seriously engage in the problems of its identification and further measurement. This point is remarkably reflected in the works of Yu. D. Bluvshtein, G.I. Zabryansky, A.S. Shlyapochnikov.
Today, this crime is considered by experts from two main positions: in the complex and regarding certain types of crimes.