National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

connections between offences cannot be answered from such records. It is
therefore quite a task to provide a reliable estimate of the scale of domestic
and industrial burglaries.
In Belgium more research has been conducted into these crimes and one of the
conclusions was that around 20% of these burglaries are committed by mobile
gangs (the groups residing in Belgium were not included in this figure). If this is
converted to the Dutch situation, around 28,000 to 34,000 burglaries would be
committed annually by supraregional groups of offenders. In 2005, for example,
this would involve 19,000 domestic burglaries and 10,000 industrial burglaries.
This is a lower limit for various reasons: the dark number is high, for example,
and the definition used in Belgium is different from that used in the Netherlands.
However, as the records are not entirely usable to draw conclusions in this
regard, this estimate of the scale is the best result that can currently be achieved.
In recent years, the Supraregional Teams have conducted between 10 and
20 investigations into domestic and industrial burglaries every year. However,
this number says nothing about the actual number of supraregional groups;
it says more about the possibilities and priorities of the Supraregional Teams.
4.2.5 Consequences for Dutch society
The direct damage caused by domestic and industrial burglaries is mainly of
a financial nature. Based on the aforementioned 20% analogy, the total annual
loss caused by supraregional criminal organisations is between 40 and 50 million
euros. We have established that the lower limit of the annual financial loss
caused by domestic burglaries is around 25 million euros. The equivalent figure
for industrial burglaries is around 15 million euros. This is a lower limit, as the
loss is probably (considerably) higher for the reasons stated above. Victims of
(mainly) domestic burglaries can suffer psychological harm due to the violation
of their privacy; the seriousness of this psychological harm increases if a case
involves violence in addition to theft.
4.2.6 Crime-related factors and expectations
One of the most important crime-related factors is the increased security level of
houses and businesses. In recent years there have been many initiatives to make
owners and other stakeholders more aware of the need for security. However,
the level of security has a limit; in so far as the reduction in police reports is the
result of increased security measures, this reduction will begin to level out after a
while. We have established that this has indeed been the case in recent years.
148 National Threat Assessment 2008 – Organised crime