Landscaping the Policing of Organised Crime

The overarching objective of the Independent Policing Commission (IPC) is to examine the roles and responsibilities of the police service in England and Wales in the twenty-first century while giving consideration to the relevance of the nine ‘Peelian principles’. In contrast, the focus of this chapter is the policing of organised crime, and one of my first thoughts was to wonder whether the Peelian principles are relevant to the policing of organised crime today. Presently the latter is conducted by a national state agency rather than local ‘Bobbies’ with whom Sir Robert Peel is associated after helping establish the first of England's many constabularies.¹ It is this issue of distinctiveness that constitutes the starting point for these reflections on the policing of organised crime and it is to facilitate the reading of points made later, that this chapter starts with a brief explanation of how we arrived at the situation we find ourselves in today.