ABSTRACT
This chapter first discusses how to deal with youth homicide and open drugs markets, as examples of serious and organised crimes, drawing particularly on the work of David Kennedy. His work is important in offering a counter to the argument that deterrence is not as effective as it is assumed to be. Indeed, if targeted carefully he and colleagues have shown that it can be highly effective with some very difficult offenders.
The bulk of the chapter then goes on to consider serious and organised crime (SOC), which is a category on its own, and which we contrast with volume crime as being generally more harmful and often involving more victims over a prolonged period. SOC can be difficult to detect and requires more resources to do so. It also involves more serious and committed offenders who are often highly motivated to work around the kinds of situational measure described as effective in relation to volume crime, where opportunistic offenders seem to be more easily deflected from criminal activity. There is no doubt that serious and organised crime is difficult to deal with, as various reviews and audits have shown. Nevertheless, there are some useful approaches that can be adopted, including those directed at prevention. We take the specific case of waste crime as an example, to illustrate these arguments.
