Interesting times: European criminal markets in 2015

Contemporary policing and the control of organized crime increasingly involve priority setting and planning. Criminal policymakers no longer focus on repressive aspects of organized crime, but want to be informed about coming challenges and threats in order to take appropriate preventive action. For that reason, there is a growing demand to change the traditional assessments of organized crime into analyses that include more prospective elements about current and potential future organized crime situations to identify specific risks or threats to society. Given the high degree of uncertainty that characterizes our understanding of organized crime, we suggest that scenario thinking can contribute to the strategic planning process of public and private security actors. We intend to advance this claim by means of an application of this technique to the organized crime involvement in criminal markets in Europe.