# Special Feature: Globalization of Crimes and Police Efforts

Regarding the Special Feature

The theme of the Special Feature of the White Paper on Police this year is “Globalization of Crimes and Police Efforts.”

Due to the progress in economic and financial globalization and the development of information and communication technology, people, goods, money and information are circulating across borders on a global scale.

While this environment is making people’s everyday life more comfortable and enriching it, it is also being exploited by international criminal organizations that try to perpetrate crimes easily and efficiently on a global scale.

Regarding “hit-and-run” crimes by foreign nationals who come to Japan with the visa status for short stay and return home immediately after the perpetration of crimes and offenses committed by criminal groups of visiting foreigners banded together by regional or blood ties, the police have for some time been pointing to their threat to public security as “internationalization of crimes” and been taking actions to deal with them.

The situation surrounding offenses committed by foreign nationals visiting Japan stayed relatively calm from the Showa period to the early years of the Heisei period, and then both the number of cases cleared and the number of foreign visitors arrested turned sharply higher since around 1991. But these offenses have been on the decline from around 2005.

However, recent offenses included jewel robberies by international gangs of robbers, organized car thefts and illegal exports by transnational crime groups and the abduction of Japanese for ransom by a Nigerian organization in South Africa. These cases indicate a qualitative change in offenses that goes beyond the dimension of “internationalization of crimes and demonstrate the emerging grave threat to public security that cannot be captured by statistical figures alone.

We now find ourselves in the situation of the “globalization of crimes,” characterized by the penetration into Japan of criminal organizations that operate on a global scale, multinational memberships of criminal organizations and the global spread of criminal offenses.

Crimes by foreign nationals visiting Japan have the characteristic features of extensiveness, systemicity and anonymity, and these features have made investigations into these offenses difficult particularly in terms of the identification of perpetrators, collection of evidence and interrogations. The addition of the new element of the “globalization of crimes” is making the difficult investigations even more difficult. More specifically, criminal organizations operating on a global scale disperse their bases of operation all over the world and make the shape of their organizations more opaque and liquid through the division of roles and systematic support within the networks of these bases. This means that the targets of investigations also spread all over the world.

In light of these developments, this feature addresses the “globalization of crimes” and police efforts to deal with the situation. Section 1. gives a broad overview of the current status of the “globalization of crimes,” Section 2. describes the police efforts to this in detail, and Section 3. provides an outlook for the future.

In order to deal with the “globalization of crimes,” we will enhance the collection and sharing of information we will as our capacity for analyses in order to shed more light on and dismantle not only international criminal organizations but also networks and infrastructure that support them. We will also rebuild the Japanese police’s fight against the “globalization of crimes” and take preemptive countermeasures by promoting measures, among other things, to strengthen cooperation with various relevant entities in Japan and build a global system of cooperation.

We hope this feature will help Japanese people become well aware of the serious threat of the “globalization of crimes” to public security and give their continued understanding and cooperation for police efforts to deal with that threat going forward.