Serious criminals and the Belgian investigators who have to fight them have made a reverse move in the past ten years. While drug gangsters and arms dealers expanded their areas of action, the departments that were supposed to develop the ‘broad-screen vision’ disappeared from the Federal Judicial Police.
The 2014 police reform, which was called an optimization, drastically cut the number of director positions in the federal police. The intention was to strengthen the provincial departments and thus get more people into the field. That in itself was not a bad principle. The police did have a lot of directors. But this reform has also lost a lot of overview. “We feel the consequences of these measures,” says Laurent Blondiau, the interim director general of the Federal Judicial Police (FGP), in an interview with De Standaard. “Now we are trying to resolve those consequences.”
One of the consequences was blindness to criminal developments. Who commits which crimes? Where, and with what modus operandi? What weapons do they use? Do they appear in other files? Do the same suspects appear in different facts? Is there a connection between victims? An ‘observatory for criminal organizations’ brings all these elements together. This creates a broader and better picture of organized crime again, after years of absence.
That observatory was opened in 2021, not coincidentally the year in which the Sky ECC case broke out. Under the direction of the Belgian police and judiciary, a heavily secured underworld communications system was exposed. It was a remarkable breakthrough in the fight against crime, which has already led to 587 (enriched) criminal files in Belgium. Three years later, the question remains whether the FGP can cope with all those terabytes of data.
“Sky was also a revelation for us,” says Blondiau. “About the size of criminal organizations in our country, their activities and the violence associated with them, the patrimony they can acquire with them.”
“But it has also forced us to structure files differently. I would even call it a paradigm shift. In a classic investigation, there is first a criminal offense, after which we look for evidence and a perpetrator. Now we have all kinds of data that certainly have criminal content, but we don’t know to which facts we can link them, or to which people. We start from the data, from the intelligence, which we have to analyze, classify and link together.”
Eight years of research
The FGP calls it ‘intelligence led policing’: investigators mine the data by combining existing software with self-developed search functions. Then they determine what should be done with it. Some of it goes abroad, information that is relevant to Belgian research is of course discussed here. Another new feature is that all files are given a grade based on their severity. Five is the highest level and means someone’s life is in danger. Four involve a criminal organization with key persons here. Three concerns other criminal groups, two and one are rather local files, for which the federal judicial police can provide support.
“That is a lesson we have learned from the Sky dossier,” says Blondiau. “We were already setting priorities before, but that research confronted us with such a mountain of data that we have stepped up that approach. Each file is treated according to its needs. We are obliged to focus our capacity, and certainly the technical and ICT resources, on the big issues. Technologically speaking, the files have only become more complex. Financial investigations can take up to eight years. I know that the public prosecutor’s offices do not think that is ideal, because they have to keep an eye on the limitation period. We try to compensate for this by doing investigative management.”
The FGP has been looking for data analysts and other IT profiles for this way of working for years. Security services, such as State Security or the Defense Cyber Command, also prey on these people. “We work together on this,” says Blondiau, “for example by attending job fairs together. At the FGP we also do what we can by shifting people internally.”
