Organised Crime

This chapter describes the emerging focus on situational crime prevention related to organised crime, an area in which repression and a law enforcement approach have been dominant. It focuses on both the theoretical background and critical remarks and shows that applying situational crime prevention to organised crime is less easy than to ordinary street crime. The chapter explores situational crime prevention theory to synthetic drugs (xtc) production in the Netherlands and discusses interventions and displacement effects. The local production of the synthetic drug ecstasy has been a thorn in the side of the Dutch government since the late 1980s. By the 1990s, it became clear that xtc was the most used hard drug in the Netherlands and was also exported abroad on a large scale. In 1995, policymakers acknowledged that the Netherlands had become an important production country. Bankers and money transfer institutions, for instance, are obliged to report unusual or suspicious money transactions.