Interview with Mr. Juha Ahokas, CBRA Finland

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31.3.2017: Todays CBRA interview is with Mr. Juha Ahokas, who is currently working for CBRA in Finland.

Hi Juha, can you please tell first about your times at the Finnish insurance and crime prevention sector?

I worked seven years as property crime prevention expert for a Finnish insurance company. During 2004-2006 I was the head of Crime Prevention Committee of Finnish Insurance Companies. The committee has permanent members from National Bureau of Investigation, Helsinki Police Department and Finnish Security Intelligence Service. The committee works as trusted information sharing platform between insurance sector and police law enforcement agencies in Finland. Police agencies share information about criminal modus operandi and insurance experts about crime prevention technologies and services. The knowledge is transformed to practical security guidelines to ensure that crime prevention is modus operandi driven, instead of technology driven. European security standardisation plays a major role in the insurance guidelines. My main lesson learned was realising that criminals are very early adopters of new technologies.

Thanks for sharing that. And next, what did you do at INTERPOL during years 2015 and 2016?

I spent the two very fruitful years at INTERPOL in Lyon. I worked as a project manager in the EU funded project – FP7-CORE – Consistently Optimised Resilient Secure Global Supply Chains. I was, and still am, very convinced that police agencies can benefit from the project results. The management logic behind criminal supply chains closely resemble legal businesses. New skills would enable police officers to better identify criminal transactions and more generally to develop risk profiling, investigation and prosecution processes. I was able to plant a seed in this new way of thinking, but it will be a long journey, before the police agencies can reap the full benefits from global supply chain management thinking. What started in customs risk management some 10-20 years ago, has only recently started to expand to strategic and tactical intelligence work in police law enforcement agencies. Strict data processing rules and undeveloped data sharing practices between different law enforcement agencies are still major obstacles. Fortunately, some national law enforcement agencies for example in the UK and the Netherlands, have taken very promising steps in cross-agency collaboration.

Cool! And what do you do today, as part of the CBRA team in Finland?

Currently I collect, compile and write content – in close cooperation with TAPA EMEA and multiple European and national expert institutions – for the European Union “Commercial freight road transport sector security guidebook”, a seven-month project mandated and funded by EC DG MOVE. The guidebook will provide operational guidance to transport companies including drivers of commercial heavy goods vehicles to strengthen their security measures to help prevent both the theft of cargo and the unauthorized intrusion of irregular migrants into their vehicles. I hope the guidebook will become a “good position paper” that triggers broader discussion how different stakeholders can support secure and safe logistics chains. I would also like to see the guidebook to give an impulse to further develop local cost-efficient and intelligence-driven security practices, as well as to facilitate next generation of public-private collaborations in this important field.

 

Thanks Juha, and see you at the CBRA 2-week superworkshop in Switzerland in 1.5 weeks’ time!