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Asian police need to 'act like triads'

Police need to act more like triads, who are fluid and creative, experts say
Police need to act more like triads, who are fluid and creative, experts say  


By Marianne Bray
CNN

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Asian law enforcers have to act more like triads if they are going to crack organized cross-border crime, experts have said at a crime-busters meeting in Hong Kong.

"Criminals don't have organized hierarchies with leaders, fixed locations and bureaucracies," Roderic Broadhurst, a University of Hong Kong criminologist, told delegates from more than 30 nations attending a meet aimed at fighting organized crime.

"We've got to be a little bit more like triads than we have been before."

Police forces need to unshackle their networks and use them creatively to match gangster syndicates thriving in a new economy and age, experts have said.

The call comes as law enforcers struggle to deal with "fluid" organized syndicates that network in all sorts of loose and effective ways to move money, drugs and people across borders almost instantaneously.

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In a bid to curb organized crime across Asia, Hong Kong's police commissioner Tsang Yam-pui said at the closing ceremony on Thursday that the territory's police force would set up an information center on triads, as well as train overseas law enforcers on their ways.

Organized syndicates -- which generate billions of dollars and pose a global threat -- are able to make headway by swooping in on loopholes and piggybacking on legitimate business practices in a global economy, leaving law enforcers one step behind.

China has a long history of triads, whose societies are said to number in the thousands and are bound by family and kinship ties, which delve in all kinds of kidnappings, fraud and trafficking crimes.

Fraught and slow

Triads make much of their money by smuggling drugs and people across borders
Triads make much of their money by smuggling drugs and people across borders  

While tools exist for locating people, servicing documents, searching and seizing, giving testimony and tracing crime proceeds across borders, the system is often fraught, slow and beset by petty jealousies and mistrust, law enforcers at the four-day meet have said.

Australia's federal police commissioner Michael Keelty called for the system to be revamped so agencies can get evidence in virtual real time to keep step with the criminals.

"It is no use receiving information two or three years later when the money has been moved around and lost and we can never trace it," echoed Canadian police commissioner, Giuliano Zaccardelli.

Police also face other restrictions that syndicates often get away with, such as crossing borders to pursue their work.

"The need for trust, for cooperation, for lateral thinking, for training, has come up time and time again during our discussions," Tsang said in his concluding speech.

Law enforcers across the board called for greater sharing of intelligence to combat the gaps in countering cross-border crimes, especially in policing the digital frontier, enforcing a cyber world and capping the drug well.

Money laundering activities already account for between two to five percent of world GDP, while the United Nations has said that people smuggling is the world's fastest growing criminal business, raking in up to $10 billion a year.

As many as one in ten Internet transactions in the Asia Pacific region involves fraud, a recent Australian Institute of Criminology report has shown.



 
 
 
 






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