The National Police have produced for the first time a national overview of families in which criminal behavior is considered to be hereditary, according to local media quoting Ritsau.
The Danish National Police have identified 35 criminal families in Denmark, according to a report submitted to the Danish Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee, as reported by the newspaper Berlingske, according to TV2.
Definition of a criminal family
A criminal family is defined as a family in which a significant proportion of its members – spread over at least two generations – are organized criminals (members of organized crime) or habitual criminals (criminals who repeat crimes).
The police must be able to prevent citizens from entering unsafe areas; this is the government's proposal, and the National Police have begun mapping out these areas following several inquiries from the Legal Affairs Committee about criminal families.
Against this backdrop, Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard asked the National Police to investigate the best ways to create an overview of criminal families in the various police departments across Denmark.
The most criminal families live in East Jutland
According to the source, the 35 families comprise a total of 636 individuals, including 119 people registered in the Police Investigation Records (PED) database.
Despite growing interest in combating criminal families, breaking criminal patterns that recur “in certain environments and families” remains a “major challenge” for the police, the National Police wrote.
Locations and numbers of criminal families in Denmark
Of the 35 families, 13 belong to the East Jutland Police District, 8 to the North Jutland Police, 6 to the Copenhagen Police, 3 to the South Jutland Police, 2 to the South and South Jutland Police, 2 to the South Jutland and Lolland-Falster Police, and 1 to the Fyn Police.
The Minister of Justice wants to apply gang laws to criminal families.
Peter Hummelgaard had previously announced that he would investigate whether it was possible to equate criminal families with gangs.
If it were up to him, the so-called gang division could be used against members of criminal families, as he told Berlingske last March.
The gang clause is a provision in Article 81A of the Penal Code, and under this law, the sentences of gang members can be doubled in a number of specific crimes, according to the source.
