National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

Alerts
6
6.1 Introduction
The objective of the National Threat Assessment is not only to contribute to
setting priorities for the fight against organised crime. It should also provide
information about other matters that may be important in this context in the
future and that require further gathering of information (alerts, section 1.3).
In this chapter several of these matters are discussed. These are mainly new or
notable phenomena that can be considered ‘additional catches’. This means
that the investigation was not from the outset set up to obtain an insight into
these criminal phenomena, which in turn means that insufficient information
is available to determine whether there is a threat or not.
In previous chapters criminal phenomena were mainly described from the
perspective of the criminal activity such as human trafficking and the growing
of Nederweed. Also the perspective of the criminal modus operandi is used,
providing an insight into the use of violence or corruption, for example.
Up to this point much less attention has been paid to the third perspective:
the involvement of a certain category of criminal organisations.
A number of groups turned up in the source material for this NTA rather regularly
and, as a result, they were more and more noticeable as the research continued.
These are criminal organisations whose members belong to population groups
that stand out because of their history and culture. This background may partly
explain certain involvement in criminal activities. This chapter analyses the
criminal activities of three specific categories of criminal organisation, namely
criminal caravan camp residents, criminal Roma and West African criminal
networks. This discussion does not address the question of whether members of
these population groups are more involved in criminal activities than other
population groups. We would also like to emphasise that it is not the intention to
stigmatise an entire group. However, it is important to take into account the
specific culture and networks of these groups during investigations.
There are a few other phenomena that are also worth mentioning. These
other phenomena will be addressed in the remaining sections, which cover
the criminal liaisons that move to the Netherlands, the cocaine washing facilities
found in the Netherlands, the use of the Internet by criminal organisations and
the role of smaller airports in smuggling.
chapter 6 – alerts
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