Organized Crime Prosecutions for August 2012
Table 1: Criminal Organized Crime Prosecutions
The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during August 2012 the government reported 16 new organized crime prosecutions.
According to the case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this number is down from 76 the previous month.
The comparisons of the number of defendants charged with organized crime-related offenses are based on case-by-case information obtained by TRAC under the Freedom
of Information Act from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys. (See Table 2)
When monthly 2012 prosecutions of this type are compared with those of the same period in
the previous year, the number of filings was down (-32.2 percent).
Prosecutions over the past year are still much lower than they were five years ago.
Overall, the data show that prosecutions of this type are down 0.5 percent from levels reported in 2007.
Figure 1: Monthly trends in organized crime prosecutions
The leveling out from the levels five years ago in organized crime prosecutions for these matters is shown more clearly in Figure 2.
The vertical bars in Figure 2
represent the number of organized crime prosecutions of this type recorded on a month-to-month
basis. Where a prosecution was initially filed in U.S. Magistrate Court and then transferred to the U.S. District Court,
the magistrate filing date was used since this provides an earlier indicator of actual trends.
The superimposed line on the bars plots the six-month moving average so
that natural fluctuations are smoothed out. To view trends year-by-year rather than month-by-month, see TRAC's annual report series for a broader picture.
Number of Defendants in Organized Crime Cases
Table 2 lists all separate cases with the number of defendants.
Table 2: Number of defendants per case
Report Generated: November 19, 2012