National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

forces all made their contributions. For the first time regional CPAs on organised
crime were prepared according to a format. The bottlenecks that occurred whilst
preparing these regional CPAs can be interpreted as teething problems. Since
the publication of the first regional CPAs, various initiatives have been developed
to draw attention to these bottlenecks and implement improvements.
There were 22 regional CPA-ZGCs available for NTA 2008, which compares to
none for NTA 2004. Nevertheless, the lack of regional CPA-ZGCs for Gooi en
Vechtstreek, Kennemerland and Amsterdam-Amstelland must be seen as a
shortcoming. This shortcoming was compensated for as much as possible by
using data about these police regions that was available from the National Crime
Squad and the Supraregional Crime Squad, both of which have a national remit.
In addition, in certain cases investigators contacted regional forces on their own
initiative to collect targeted information for their specific subject.
In the National Threat Assessment qualifications are assigned to criminal
phenomena according to a fixed procedure. As explained in the discussion of the
method, the qualification of a criminal phenomenon is based on intersubjectivity.
This means that a different group of assessors could arrive at their own, possibly
different, qualification. Bearing this in mind, it is important to emphasise the role
of the line of reasoning. Greater value should be attached to the arguments that
resulted in a particular qualification than to the qualification itself.
In 2004 the first National Threat Assessment generally met with a positive
response. There was some criticism because certain criminal phenomena that
were deemed to be important by the critics had not been included. For example,
there was no focus on ‘cannabis’ at all and too little attention was paid to
‘fraud’. This is why the NTA 2008 project was launched based on a complete list
of primary criminal activities, supplemented by a important criminal working
methods. The intention was to make NTA 2008 ‘more complete’ than NTA 2004.
Attention was also paid to organised crimes against property committed by
supraregional criminal organisations. As a result, part of the ‘mid-level crime’
was also mapped out.
However, every approach or working method has its downside, including this
one. For example, the discussion of themes such as the role of Schiphol Airport
and Rotterdam Harbour in cross-border crime as independent subjects, as in
NTA 2004, does not fit in with the structure of the current National Threat
Assessment, which is based on ‘criminal phenomena’. This difference in working
method means that the present final report does not contain a systematic
comparison of the results from NTA 2008 with those from NTA 2004.
26 National Threat Assessment 2008 – Organised crime