The SOCTA: a tool for prioritising the fight against serious and organised crime in the EU

Abstract

SOCTA (Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment) is developed and operated by EUROPOL. The follow-up to OCTA starts in 2013 and will finish in 2017. The author summarises in the paper brief information about SOCTA. The programme is in line with the organised crime situation reports (OCSR), the first Europol reports from 1994, when Europol was still the Europol Drugs Unit, the organised crime reports (OCR) from 2002 and OCTA from 2006 up to 2011. SOCTA will be ‘a forward-looking document, with a primary focus on future developments in criminal threats’. The author emphasises the separation between the SOCTA methods of analysis and scientific research: the SOCTA approach is ‘to facilitate effective interventions’, moreover there is ‘the need for speed, secrecy and professional trust’. The final ideas of the article have the purpose of generate new discussions about scientific research and intelligence-led policing data collections.