As a country located in the heart of Europe, the Czech Republic is highly vulnerable to border transcending organised crime. For the Organised Crime Detection Unit (OCDU) of the Czech police, an important part of the effort against organised crime consequently involves dealing with criminal networks that straddle national borders and often operate in foreign languages.
Although being essential for a successful counter crime policy, the capacity of the OCDU to deal with this type of networks has until now been limited by an inadequate ICT infrastructure. The hardware and software employed by the unit do not meet European standards, a situation that makes full scale participation in international police cooperation difficult. Considering the fundamental importance of such cooperation for the fight against cross-border crime, this has been a grave impediment to the efforts to control organised crime on Czech territory.
With support from Norway, this is now about to change. Through the project "Improving the fight against criminal structures", the OCDU will be provided with up to date electronic equipment, a move that will vastly improve the unit's operational capabilities. Using the new equipment, police officers will in the future be able to rapidly process and transfer information collected on the crime site, as well as participating to a fuller extent in information exchange within the EUROPOL and other systems of international police cooperation.
In addition to the improvements to the unit's technical infrastructure, the project also involves staff training courses. This training will be undertaken in cooperation with Norwegian and German police officials. Among the topics of these courses are criminal activities among the nationality groups living in the Czech Republic, the specific characteristics of crime within these groups, as well as operational use of technical equipment.