Emergo een rapport - Website voor de Politie

objective of intervening where possible in the crime­related
problems in the 1012 postcode area. A small group of researchers,
with occasional support on some subprojects from analysts of
the agencies involved, assisted in analysing the problems and
creating the facilities needed to carry out these analyses.
For various reasons, it took the project some considerable
time to gain momentum. One reason was the project’s organizational
complexity. After all, the cooperating organizations and
agencies are largely autonomous, and none regarded Amsterdam’s
city centre as a unit of territorial organization. This meant
that before the project, cooperation had been the exception
rather than the rule. An equally important reason was related
to this, the Memorandum of Agreement was insufficient in itself
to facilitate the immediate exchange of information within
Emergo. It was more than a year before a clear legal framework
for the collection, exchange and use of information emerged,
and the technical systems to support informative collaboration
became available. A third factor at the outset of Emergo was
the absence of an up­to­date and well thought­out scientific
or police­based analysis of the crime­related problems in the
1012 postcode area on which to base immediate targeted
interventions.
In the autumn of 2007, in order to get the project moving in
the face of these obstacles, a preliminary survey was carried out
to assess the seriousness of the crime­related problems in the
1012 postcode area, and to identify the stumbling blocks to
cooperation between organizations and agencies in combating
these problems. The output of the preliminary survey helped
formulate the research and action strategy which has guided the
activities within Emergo in recent years, albeit with the flexibility
required by a pilot project of this kind.
In essence, the strategy was exploration by trial­and­error of
how to gain the clearest possible picture of the actual state of
affairs in the 1012 postcode area through analysis and action from
three different perspectives. There were to be a few relatively
small initial pilot projects to gain experience with the integrated
and informed approach to problems in this area. The experience
and findings that emerged from these pilot projects were then to
be used to set up ict projects to explore not only the extent to
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