The legal regulation of the community volunteer groups participation in the arresting of offenders in Russia

The subject of the study is the norms of administrative, administrative tort, and criminal procedural legislation regulating the detention of individuals who have committed crimes and administrative offenses, specifically in relation to the participation of community volunteer groups in the corresponding procedural actions. The author also examines clarifications from the Plenary Session of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, specific provisions of Soviet administrative legislation regarding the powers of community volunteer groups, as well as judicial practice. The relevance of the research is determined by the fact that community volunteers are elements of the non-governmental system of public safety and perform, alongside the tasks of preventing offenses, their actual suppression, which has traditionally been the function of law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement practice confirms that community volunteer groups actually carry out the detention of offenders; however, the normative basis for these actions remains unclear. The study employs formal-legal, comparative-legal, and historical-legal methods. Content analysis of the selected judicial decisions was conducted using the Claude neural network (Anthropic), which organized judicial acts regarding the conditions for volunteers' participation in detention and identified relevant text fragments. Based on the research findings, the author concludes that there is no clear regulation regarding the participation of community volunteer groups in the detention of offenders. It is established that Article 38 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, considering the interpretation by the Plenary Session of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, effectively allows volunteers to independently detain individuals who have committed a crime. At the same time, Article 27.3 of the Administrative Offenses Code of the Russian Federation contains a closed list of entities authorized for administrative detention, in which community volunteers are not mentioned. As a result of the content analysis of judicial decisions in criminal cases, it is concluded that courts recognize the procedural significance of the fact of detention by volunteers, despite their non-governmental nature. A case has been identified in judicial practice where, in the absence of legal grounds, volunteers detained an individual who committed an administrative offense. It is emphasized that, unlike Soviet legislation (Article 238 of the RSFSR Administrative Offenses Code), volunteers are not granted the authority to deliver or detain offenders. The research proposes amendments to Article 17 of Federal Law No. 44-FZ granting volunteers the right to detain individuals who have committed crimes or administrative offenses, as well as amendments to Articles 27.2 and 27.3 of the Administrative Offenses Code of the Russian Federation with appropriate provisions.