Prevention of crime by criminal law and operational-search means

Abstract

In the early 2000s, the Russian legislator massively introduced the term “preventing crime” into regulations thus replacing the concept of “fighting against crime”. Thus, the changes influenced federal law No. 130-FZ “Combating Terrorism” dated 25 July 1998 and many other laws. The very concept of the state’s response to violation of the established prohibitions has changed. If in the old version of the laws, punishment for committing a crime was the main preventive measure, then in the new understanding the key efforts of the state should have been focused on preventing the very event of a crime. On the one hand, this is an absolutely correct step, since it is much more profitable for the state (in socio-economic, political and other respects) to keep the population from violating the established rules than to be forced to launch a complex and expensive criminal procedural mechanism (to identify, disclose, investigate crimes, consider them in court, execute punishment, etc.). On the other hand, in the new laws, the term “prevention” is used ambiguously, to both characterise “crime prevention” activities and characterise “crime control” activities. The research objective is to find the most optimal ways to eliminate theoretical and practical contradictions arising from the law enforcement in connection with the tautology of the texts of federal laws in the field of combating crime. In the course of the research, the dialectical method of cognition was used, as well as general scientific (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, logical, systemic and structural methods) and specific scientific methods of cognition (historical, statistical and formal-legal). It is proposed to unify the definition of “combating crime” by introducing the same definitions into the federal law “Operational Investigative Activity”, “Countering Terrorism”, and other regulatory documents related to “combating crime”.