ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a picture of organized crime in Europe and its different forms of assessment. More than most other types of crime, organized crime is a social construct that strongly reflects policy choices and beliefs. Until the beginning of the 1990s, organized crime remained merely a state concern, hardly taken up at the European level, with little attention paid to its potential transnational aspects. The goal of the Organised Crime Threat Assessments (OCTAs) is to identify criminal combinations that are shaping the organized crime dynamics in the European Union. In 2006, the first OCTA was published, and it was meant to provide a more future-looking approach as was requested by The Hague Programme of 2005. By 2009, Europol took another approach towards the analysis of organized crime groups. The criminal markets, the criminal hubs and money laundering as a horizontal dimension of criminal markets remained the same.
