Title: Can law enforcement agencies become learning organisations?

• In Event: Reflecting on the Dutch integrated approach to contain and prevent organized and organizational crime

Abstract

The collaboration between agencies as well as the integration of diverse law enforcement processes and procedures have been areas of focus and experimentation within the Netherlands for several years. As this way of working is applied to different crime types or to broad crime categories - for example, ondermijning or environmental crime - it is important to take stock of what these experiences teach us. In the field of (international) environmental crime, the Dutch police force initiated a programma that operated between 2012 and 2019: a team of specialised police officers whose task it has been to investigate specific forms of waste crime connected to the oil industry. In this contribution, we look at the way the team was set up as well as its interactions with other agencies, such as the Openbaar Ministerie, ILT, Customs and Port Authorities. Furthermore, we try to understand how the team’s efforts fare vis-a-vis the criminogenic elements that have facilitated the crimes the team investigated. Lastly, we reflect on how an experience like this fits within the broader institutional set up of Dutch law enforcement; specifically, how learning and capacity building in small-scale temporary experiments is connected to larger scale processes of institutional capacity building. The situational crime prevention and problem-oriented policing frameworks provide the analytical basis for this examination. Further concepts from literature on regulation as well as public administration and systems thinking are also drawn on to propose an integrated framework for exploring the development and functioning of (criminal) law enforcement.

Author

• Giulia Giardi, Maastricht University