SOC ACE Partners with RUSI for Inaugural Serious and Organised Crime Conference 2023
On Monday 4th and Tuesday 5th December SOC ACE proudly partnered with RUSI for its inaugural Serious and Organised Crime Conference 2023, organised by RUSI’s Organised Crime & Policing Group alongside the National Crime Agency.
The event brought together law enforcement, policymakers, academics, researchers, analysts, and industry experts to tackle serious and organised crime in the UK.
Participants took advantage of this unique opportunity to refine research needs and explore how practitioners and researchers can collaborate to enhance the UK's response to organised crime and better measure the impact of law enforcement activities. Key sessions focused on degrading harmful crime groups, protecting the UK from international criminal networks, and addressing the criminal use of technology.
The event featured three core sessions to foster cross-sector collaboration:
Upstream: Targeting the most harmful crime groups, their networks and their enablers.
Overseas: Protecting the UK's integrity against international organised criminal networks.
Online: Tackling the evolving criminal use of technology as an enable of all serious and organised crime threats.
SOC ACE Director Professor Heather Marquette from the University of Birmingham joined a panel discussion on "Collaborative Approaches in SOC Case Studies and Best Practices," alongside Dr. Rajan Basra (King's College London), Dr. Phininder Balaghan (QinetiQ), and Dr. Bill Merrill (National Crime Agency). Contributions were also made by SOC ACE researchers from RUSI, including Cathy Haenlein, Dr. Liam O’Shea, and Matthew Redhead.
The conference also featured notable speakers such as Graeme Biggar (Director General, NCA), Dan Jarvis MP (Shadow Minister for Security), Lord Evans of Weardale (former Director General of the British Security Service), and investigative journalist Oliver Bullough.
To mark the NCA’s 10th anniversary, Cathy Haenlein and Lord Evans released the first in a 10-part series leading up to the conference on "A Boundless Threat: the Rise of Organised Crime in the UK."