Policing organized crime

Until a few decades ago, the police were mainly a reactive bureaucratic organization that moved from one criminal event to the next, according to the degree to which the outside world required its services. Since then the police have abandoned the emphasis on law enforcement with regards to petty crime and public order. More recently the police have developed community policing as an important strategy in which preventive and pro-active operations are considered to be more useful and effective than exclusively enforcing criminal law after the offence has been committed (see Aronowitz, in this issue). However, in their approach to organized crime and various types of organizational crime, the police continue to operate in the same way as they have done for years. Based on victims' reports or criminal intelligence, the police will conduct surveillance on a criminal group, establish a special police team within the depar tment specialized in the crime concerned and will try to arrest the members (and preferably the leaders of the group), and ensure that enough evidence is available to result in a prosecution. This process requires thorough and t ime-consuming detective work. Until recently the police viewed organized crime as Mafia-like families with strict discipline and a hierarchical structure, in which one or two leaders carry out specialized tasks using violence, as if it were a company or a governmental organization. To a certain degree that Godfather Myth is still alive in the police force. In short, police (and public prosecutors) considered organized crime to