‘Serious’ Shifts in Organised Crime Control

Abstract

The state’s prescribed responses to ‘serious crime’ present novel changes in criminal justice policy and criminal law that have received very little scrutiny, particularly in academic discourses and analyses. This chapter addresses the concept of serious crime and its relationship with past policies dealing with organised crime. It provides a background to ‘serious and organised crime’, a concept reinforced by substantive legislative and executive activity in the UK, namely, through the establishment of a Serious Organised Crime Agency (hereafter SOCA)¹ (pursuant to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 [hereafter SOCPA 2005]) and the SCPO (under the Serious Crime Act 2007 [hereafter SCA 2007]²). The chapter has two key objectives: the first is to place the SCPO against a background of past policies in this policy arena; and the second is to provide a more detailed statutory description of this new order within the broader context of the 2007 Act in which it is situated.