Europol’s light touch on Neighbourhood Policing

“Tackling serious and organised crime also means prioritising victim protection. Intelligence-led operations are critical, but law enforcement must remain committed to supporting victims—amplifying their voices and addressing their needs. This focus not only alleviates the immediate harm inflicted on individuals,

“…  By addressing crime at its roots, we empower victims to break free from cycles of exploitation. Ultimately, securing justice for victims strengthens the trust between police and the communities we serve, helping to build a more resilient and cohesive society.”

Europol: The changing DNA of serious and organised crime. 2025 Serious and Organised Threat Assessment.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/EU-SOCTA-2025.pdf

Emphasising a stark realisation; crime directly or indirectly affects each citizen, village, town, city, up to and including national destabilisation. Inadvertently Europol’s comprehensive threat assessment puts an unlikely context on the professional allegiances, protocols and relationships found in neighbourhood policing. It illustrates the value community intelligence has at a pan-European level and the ‘significance of the insignificant’, whilst reinforcing the invaluable importance of local contributions against the scale of the task.

Europol’s raison d’être is the dismantling of criminal networks by tackling serious and organised crime; national government’s domestic policies identify priorities, strategies, and security goals, yet to neither is neighbourhood policing unrecognised, unobserved, or unappreciated in the milieu that is trans-national crime.

The current evolution of serious and organised crime (SOC) is it is, “progressively destabilising society, increasingly nurtured online, and strongly accelerated by AI and other new techniques”. (p10). One such threat to the fabric of local communities is the criminal exploitation of the young. Seen as low-risk assets by criminal networks, the immature perpetrators recruited by SOC face an irreversible future whilst increasingly posing a tangible danger within neighbourhoods through a predilection for violence with an increased use of weapons.

There is an innate subtlety within UK policing, a commonality of cohesion, it is borne out of mutual respect, each officer a constable, each department an equivalent counterpart.

The Neighbourhood Policing Pathway (NPP) programme’s imminent introduction by the College of Policing is constructed to readdress visibility in local policing. Chief Constable Sir Andy Marsh QPM, CEO of the college is quoted in December 2024: “Neighbourhood policing is a vital foundation of any police force if they are to be effective in cutting crime and helping people feel safe in their communities.” A desired outcome of the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee will deliver tangible consequences for the safety of UK citizens, as set out by the Government’s Crime and Policing Bill 2025.

There will be indirect outcomes through the many disparate approaches employed to confront SOC, but one ancillary contribution of the NPP programme is improved lines of communication between community and police which will enhance the provision of protection for young persons.

Reassuringly, information on trends and modus operandi of street-level crime not only corroborate intelligence analysis they substantiate force control strategies, provide data for threat assessments and generate intelligence collection plans alike. The RuPaul’s Drag Race UK winner, James Lee Williams, aka ‘Vivienne’, died from cardiac arrest caused by the effects of Ketamine abuse (BBC report March 17, 2025); the very synthetic narcotic mentioned in the EU-SOCTA as having limited reporting.

The NPP’s indirect contribution may well be immeasurable and though slight it’s a contradiction that is all to common in the intelligence sphere. The SOCTA report examines a series of serious and organised criminal ventures, identifying both the fluidity and sophistication of criminal enterprises. The overlap with NPP is indistinguishable within the daily practice of community policing, it is not conscious or targeted intelligence collection, it is merely the recording, reporting, collation of information encountered through routine.

Further regard to the EU-SOCTA highlights an overlooked benefit to neighbourhood policing of self-confidence building for frontline officers: remarkable technological developments in policing and exciting opportunities offered for professional progression in sophisticated departments is more often than not a career goal, (likewise a preparation for promotion). Similarly, whole sections of communities read with relish and a high degree of comfort the implementation of advancements in policing tactics – facial recognition one such current example.

Where attention is required is promoting the contribution that frontline policing provides in distinguishing between reactive and proactive intervention. The facts that SOC is destabilising society, it is nurtured online and accelerated by AI and other new techniques is generally accepted, what is not commonly discussed is around the value of community liaison, the conversation of fraternity.

The EU-SOCTA provides on overview; delivering insight along complex criminal network lines, what it also achieves is distinguishing between the technical and the personal; it is where community intelligence-led policing’s contribution sits in the modern environment. The online domain dominates legitimate and illegitimate facets of everyday life, what neighbourhood policing provides is pragmatism: communication, reassurance, support, and protection to not only those victims, but protagonists alike.

The criminal world is almost wholly dependent on its victims; the online world is their realm but there are many points at which there is a breakout into the real world per se. Corruption and criminal threats come to mind without a thought, as does violence associated with drug, weapons, and people trafficking. Violence is probably the most common overlap of SOC across local communities, returning us to acknowledging young perpetrators as victims of criminal exploitation.

A physical distance is often necessary for an organised crime group to evade association with the offence, for example trafficking in goods and persons cross border is under much media attention as well as rightly receiving proportionate law enforcement scrutiny. Certain areas of criminality require enhanced physical contact through engagement for perpetrators recruited at the ‘business’ end, from trafficking in human beings, child sexual exploitation, sexual services industry, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, firearms, to the impact of environmental and wildlife crime or the organised criminality behind motor vehicle theft, burglaries, the evidence is exhaustive.

Neighbourhood policing has an air of respectability; its perception is almost tranquil; it is what arguably sets UK constabularies apart from their counterparts across the rest of the world. An emphasis on interaction, dialogue and problem solving; a commitment to understanding and service, and now the promise of a named officer in every locality as a just reward.

There is no contradiction. Patrolling communities is central to the philosophy as is care and dedication to the task, what NPP also delivers on is information channels, the facility to accept contributions from all sectors of communities and individuals alike.

A consequence is material, however insignificant it may appear to the citizen, indeed even to the neighbourhood officer, has a worth, it is the expertise of intelligence officers that will determine its value. That said, it is not a wholesale depository, what it does provide is flexibility for forces.

A slogan I created is: ‘Everyone lives somewhere, everybody eats, drinks, shops; at one point in their life, they had a relative, some have neighbours, cars, pets, even gang associations, or colleagues, club-mates, social acquaintances, contacts, paramours, right down to the ubiquitous old school friend.”

A community bobby may know those on their ‘patch’ by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, colour, age, even political persuasion or football club allegiance; be it cultural, religious, socio-economic or race within the locality of a suburb, district, hamlet, zone, ward, area, region, county. What the EU-SOCTA demonstrates is that an individual community intelligence submission may be of value at an unimagined level. An altruistic act of kindness, a random suggestion to assist community cohesion, a volunteered observation, a purely innocent comment to a neighbourhood team member in the course of an average day, each may provide an insight of importance known only to the intelligence world.

Community intelligence-led methodology is not a formulated intelligence collection plan within a force’s control strategy, what it is, is a functionality. It is a force’s ability to obtain off its officers, information that may otherwise be abandoned to the deepest recesses at the back-of-their-minds. The SOCTA itself is titled: ‘The changing DNA of serious and organised crime’, its incendiary first few sentences are a ‘call to action’. Neighbourhood policing’s contribution is on delivering on expectation; that is, through the Government’s Safer Streets mission as Dame Diana Johnson, the Crime and Policing Minister, said in introducing the NPP: “Every community deserves local officers who understand what is needed to keep them safe, and with this new training and our Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, we will deliver the change our towns and villages are desperate for.”

Community Intelligence-Led Policing Methodology is synonymous with a xenophobic attitude to SOC networks. Contrastingly, the innocence of compliance within the neighbourhood policing pathway is that in fulfilling their roles officers will inadvertently be contributing to protecting their communities from far more sinister threats. The Prime Minister’s mission will focus attention on a community officer performance framework which sets out the standards the public can expect from their neighbourhood officers, reinforced by the Home Secretary: “This marks a return to the founding principles of British policing – where officers are part of the communities they serve.”

An holistic strategy rebuilding trust and the vital connection between public and police by a mission-led government surreptitiously reinforcing the fight against SOC networks.

Steve Dodd is a retired South Wales Police detective. He is a subject matter expert on police intelligence having authored the force’s Community Intelligence Force Policy. An adviser on the College of Policing’s Intelligence Professionalisation Programme, he was deployed on the Government’s working group on the Western Balkans Serious Organised Crime strategy. An international liaison officer, he is an international airline certified extradition officer, plus National Financial Investigator qualified. He is currently writing his ‘Community Intelligence-Led Policing Methodology’ including the octahedron pyramid, a transtheoretical approach, and an inverted strategy thesis.