ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of the response made by the police in England and Wales1 to transnational organised crime. In doing so it focuses on policing activity in this area rather than formal police structures or the legal provisions which support transnational policing. The justification for this approach is that these formal organisational and legal structures do not in themselves adequately reveal the nature of the strategies that the police use. Policing is defined not by how the police are organised or by what they could or should do but rather by their actions, or as Manning (2000: 182) has put it: ‘Without analysis of dynamic policing transactions, one is left with stark formalism and typologies with are intellectually impoverished.’
