Paradigms, Pathologies, and Practicalities- Policing Organized Crime in England and Wales

Policing organized crime remains problematic, notwithstanding the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Adopting Brodeur's construction of ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing, and following the government's reconfiguration of organized crime as a national/transnational security threat rather than a purely criminal threat, this paper summarises the practical and pathological challenges presented by organized crime to traditional policing paradigms. Thus presented as having outgrown local policing competence, and so justifying new investigative powers and agencies, organized crime is still manifested locally: ad hoc collaboration is filling part of the capacity and capability response void. The so-called level 2 gap is as much conceptual as structural.