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The National Crime Agency (NCA) is a national law enforcement agency in the United Kingdom which replaced the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It became fully operational on 7 October 2013 and is a non-ministerial government department. The NCA includes the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre as an individual command, and parts of the National Policing Improvement Agency. Some of the responsibilities of the UK Border Agency relating to border policing also became part of the NCA. It is the UK's lead agency against organised crime; human, weapon and drug trafficking; cyber crime; and economic crime that goes across regional and international borders, but can be tasked to investigate any crime. The NCA has a strategic role in which it looks at the bigger picture across the UK, analysing how criminals are operating and how they can be disrupted. To do this it works closely with regional organised crime units (ROCUs), the Serious Fraud Office, as well as individual police forces. It is the UK point of contact for foreign agencies such as Interpol, Europol and other international law enforcement agencies. The NCA has also taken on a range of functions from the National Policing Improvement Agency that has been scrapped as part of the government's changes to policing. These include a specialist database relating to injuries and unusual weapons, expert research on potential serial killers, and the National Missing Persons Bureau. The agencies going into the NCA had a combined budget of £812m, yet the new agency only had £464m in its first year, so the new agency had already had an almost 50% cut before it had started operating. Like its predecessor SOCA, the NCA has been dubbed the "British FBI" by the media. The NCA Director-General, Keith Bristow, has the power to direct regional police chiefs to concentrate their resources where necessary, effectively making him the most senior police officer in the country. ==History== The proposed agency was first publicly announced in a statement to the House of Commons by Home Secretary Theresa May on 26 July 2010. On 8 June 2011 Theresa May declared that the NCA will comprise a number of distinct operational commands: Organised Crime, Border Policing, Economic Crime and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre - and that it will house the National Cyber Crime Unit. She added that capabilities, expertise, assets and intelligence will be shared across the new agency; that each Command will operate as part of one single organisation; and that the NCA will be a powerful body of operational crime fighters, led by a senior Chief Constable and accountable to the Home Secretary. In her statement to the House of Commons, Theresa May stated that the new agency would have the authority to "undertake tasking and coordination, ensuring appropriate action is taken to put a stop to the activities of organised crime groups". In June 2011, the coalition government announced that SOCA's operations (serious drug trafficking investigative and intelligence sections) would be merged into a larger ''National Crime Agency'' to launch in 2013. On 23 September 2011 the Home Affairs Select Committee called for the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism role be given to the NCA when it becomes operational saying that the terrorist threat is a "national problem" and that there would be "advantages" in transferring responsibility. The Metropolitan police raised concerns around the cost of such a move.〔()〕 The Home affairs select committee met again on 9 May 2014 to discuss counter terrorism. As a part of the report the committee reconsidered the question of moving counter terrorism responsibilities to the NCA. The committee came to conclusion that “The Metropolitan Police have a wide remit which has many complexities and the current difficulties faced by the organisation lead us to believe that the responsibility for counter-terrorism ought to be moved to the NCA in order to allow the Met to focus on the basics of policing London. The work to transfer the command ought to begin immediately with a view to a full transfer of responsibility for counter-terrorism operations taking place, for example within five years after the NCA became operational, in 2018. When this takes place, it should finally complete the jigsaw of the new landscape of policing.” However the report acknowledges that the NCA is still a new agency and that at the time it was not fully operational in Northern Ireland. Questions have been raised as to how effective this model would be and, with a limited budget, whether other responsibilities would suffer and not be resourced as properly as they should be. If the whole of Counter Terrorism Command were to transfer from the Metropolitan police to the NCA, the NCA would receive a further 1,500 officers or more if other counter terrorism units transferred in as well. It raised the question of what other National police units could be absorbed into the NCA, such as the National Wildlife Crime Unit, National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service and other units with a national remit from ACPO, the Metropolitan Police and other forces. Plans are being discussed for the second time of moving the Serious Fraud Office into the NCA.〔() 〕 The process of looking at moving counter terrorism into the NCA was put on hold on the 9th October 2014 by the Home secretary Theresa May due to an increase in the terror threat level. In October 2011, it was announced that Keith Bristow, the then Chief Constable of Warwickshire Police, would head the organisation. The NCA came into being under provisions granted by the Crime and Courts Act 2013 which received Royal Assent on 25 April 2013. Until the 20 May 2015, the agency was only able to carry out border and customs functions in Northern Ireland. This was due to the fact that under the 1998 Good Friday agreement that led to a political settlement and power-sharing in Northern Ireland, policing was subjected to a far higher degree of community oversight and monitoring than in other parts of the UK. The chief constable and officers are responsible to the Policing Board. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「National Crime Agency」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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