Public danger of the offender as a relatively new phenomenon in the police prevention activity

In the Russian Federation, preventive registration of some offenders requires establishing their danger to others. Nowadays this should be applied to the offenders with mental disorders, drug or alcohol addicts, who commit offenses in family and domestic relationships. The criteria for this danger are not described in any of the currently existing documents. In this paper, the author analyses the legal nature of preventive registration to conclude that description of the danger in this category of offenders should be based on the theory of "social danger of a person". However, the probability of a repeated delict is different on the part of different people and depends on the individual characteristics of a particular person and, to some extent, on their social environment. Given the current regulatory framework, it should be pointed out that legal recognition of a person as dangerous to others falls within the competence of the head of the territorial body of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The study of the procedure for recognising a person as dangerous shows that the main and, in fact, independent subject of recognition is the district police officer. The author uses empirical research methods (questionnaire, study of documents) to make the following conclusion. Since the knowledge of the nature of a mental disorder is strictly special, the recognition of a person suffering from this disorder as dangerous must largely rely on the opinion of a psychiatrist. The danger of a drug addict depends on the type of addiction and degree of their intellectual deprivation. It requires considering an opinion of a narcologist, which, however, is not an unconditional reason to recognise a person as dangerous. Uncontrolled outbreaks of aggression of a person with alcoholism clearly indicate their danger to others. People committing an offense in family and domestic relationships are dangerous for others only if their negative individual characteristics prevail over positive qualities.

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