Scotland's leading crimefighting agency is beginning an FBI-style internship and opening its doors to academics for the first time.

Scotland's leading crimefighting agency is beginning an FBI-style internship and opening its doors to academics for the first time.

The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) is seconding a top academic to the agency for one day a week to look at ways to "toughen" legitimate business against the threat of organised crime.

Dr Simon MacKenzie, an expert in international smuggling and antiquity theft at Glasgow University, will be the first academic to work inside the agency. From this week onwards he will spend one day a week at their headquarters working alongside officers involved in some of Scotland's most covert operations.

In future, other academics from the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR) - a collaboration between four universities partly funded by the Scottish Government - and Phd students may be seconded to the agency in an internship programme mirroring that of the FBI.

The FBI Honours Internship Programme offers hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students 10 weeks of unpaid work experience each summer. Students with psychology, sociology or criminology backgrounds work on research projects such as the analysis of crime data.

Honours Interns with a computer science background have worked on projects such as the development of a portal to facilitate the exchange of data between the FBI and law enforcement agencies at state and local levels.

Detective chief inspector Alan Cunningham of SCDEA, said: "The notion of internships is something we are open to discussing, and involving Phd students and others is further down the road, but in the longer term it is something we hope to achieve.

"This is a cultural change for the agency. It is not a secret organisation but much of what we do is covert and we have not gone out of our way to publicise techniques or methods of working.

"However, as serious and organised criminals become more sophisticated, we have to work on new ways to get ahead of them. We can not do that without looking more widely. We need to look beyond law enforcement to get ahead of the criminals."

The scheme - effectively funded by the Scottish Government - is thought to be well timed as a result of market opportunities of the credit crunch.

"Our experience is that serious and organised criminals are adept at exploiting opportunities and are heavily influenced by socio-economic conditions," Mr Cunningham added. "The current situation with the economy may be one they try to exploit and we will seek to identify any weaker points before they do.

"A large part of the vulnerability of any organisation is their people. One aspect of this may be to look at improving pre-employment vetting and exit procedures."

Mr MacKenzie will focus on how to "target harden" legitimate business against organised crime, including fraud and internet scams. He will also review trends to identify sectors that organised crime may seek to exploit.

The Scottish Government has set SCDEA five strategic priorities for 2008-09, one of which is: "Support legitimate business by identifying and pursuing opportunities for intervention tactics and techniques in the fight against serious organised crime."

"We have already seen target hardening in relation to putting better locks on houses and cars to stop them being stolen," said Mr Mackenzie. "There is a line of thought following this to do market hardening in the business sector and identify weaknesses in market routines before criminal networks.

"It is about crime prevention and reducing opportunities for those in serious and organised crime."