Material for a 3-hour lesson, part of the Customs Criminal Investigation Course, developed by the Kosovo Police Service School
With the introduction of the new Customs Legislation, we have already discussed that many powers have been given to the Customs Service so that it can achieve its roles of revenue collection and protection of society. One of the important powers that it assigns to you is the power of arrest in relation to customs criminal offences. This is not a “general power” that allows you to arrest anyone for breaking any law, it is a power that is laid to you specifically for certain customs offences. It is important to appreciate that customs offences fall into two categories, namely administrative offences and criminal offences. So, certain offences can be dealt with by administrative penalties such as seizure of goods and/or financial penalties, whilst other, more serious offences, can be dealt with under the criminal law by court imposed fines and/or terms of imprisonment.
As this is a Customs Criminal Investigation Course, the focus will lie on how to conduct investigation into criminal offences and the procedures that should be followed. You need to have a very good knowledge all of the criminal offences in The Code and what the elements of each offence are for you to be able to perform your duties as an Investigation officer. Arresting someone (depriving them of their liberty) is a very serious matter which should only be performed when you have reasonable grounds to suspect that all the elements of an arrestable offence have been committed and that arrest is appropriate. We will speak more about arrest later in the course. The purpose of this session is to make you completely familiar with the ingredients of an offence.
The goal of this lesson is to make officers aware of the elements that make up a criminal offence and the criminal offences that are contained in the new Customs Code.
At the conclusion of this lesson, students will be able to: