Text Box: in complementing, if not replacing, this focus on manipulating dispositions, whether through combinations of punishment and welfare and deterrence and rehabilitation, with a focus on reducing the opportunities for committing crime. Clarke has developed an elaborate framework for the ‘situational crime prevention’ of volume crimes such as household burglary, theft of and from automobiles and forms of inter-personal violence. It is argued that such crimes can be reduced by highly focussed interventions in the immediate situational environments in which they occur, so as to increase the risk of apprehension on behalf of offenders, increase the effort of committing the crime and reduce the rewards and proceeds from such crime. More recently, this framework has been developed further to accommodate the opportunity structures of crime that are generated by people’s ‘routine activities’ and everyday lifestyles (Felson, 1994; Clarke, 1997). Levi (1998) suggests the application of situational crime prevention principles to the identification and manipulation of opportunities for organised crime is an important form of policy innovation and learning. The application of opportunity reducing techniques implies an investment in identifying the stratagems and mechanisms employed by networks of organised criminals to, for example, communicate with each other and with nominally licit entrepreneurs, traffic illicit goods and services and launder the proceeds of crime. Situational methods could, in principle, be adopted to disrupt these interconnections (Klerks, 1999). There is, however, a vibrant debate over the intended and unintended consequences of situational prevention for displacing, diffusing and deflecting crime from those targets which are protected towards those currently lacking the resources and technologies to adopt prevention methods. To this end it is argued that situational crime prevention can potentially accentuate the victimisation of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged who are unable to acquire or receive situational methods. A further challenge leveled at the situational approach is that it fails to address the broader social contexts that can enable or preclude the reproduction of criminality and victimisation. Hobbs (2000), for example, argues that organised criminal activity needs to be examined in terms of the specific ‘locales’ inhabited by particular ‘fraternities’ - alliances, ‘firms’ and familial/kinship networks – of criminals. A fore-grounding of social context in the analysis of organised crime reveals a diversity of local experiences each with crucial implications for policy reform, transfer and learning in the governmental response to this problem. Hobbs (1998), for example, draws a distinction between the dynamics of serious crime in two English localities, the East End of London and the North East of England. In the East End, criminal networks are more protean, reflecting the impact of social, economic and political restructuring on the disintegration of traditional communities - in particular the effect of slum clearance and urban renewal policies that have ‘emptied-out’ once cohesive local communities, displacing them to the Essex and Kent hinterlands of the East End. Conversely, local communities in the North East of England have been reproduced over many decades undisturbed by the housing allocation policies or the high turnover of migrant populations experienced in the contemporary London metropolis. Text Box: As a consequence, criminal fraternities in the North East of England have a greater longevity than their London counterparts. The essential point here is that a failure to tailor policy responses to the locally specific contexts of organised crime is likely to promote a ‘naïve’ emulation of crime control strategies and techniques. At best this will fail to address the real causal dynamics of crime in these different contexts and, at worst, prove counterproductive in taking scarce resources away from local welfare and crime control agencies thereby actually creating greater uncontrolled, unregulated, space for illicit entrepreneurial activity (Stelfox, 1999). IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND POLICY REFORM Under this third theme of the preliminary findings it is possible to identify four basic implications for the research-policy relationship in formulating and implementing responses to organised crime: the tension between strategies of enforcement, prevention and regulation; between public and private responsibilities for security; between the contribution of government ‘expert’ and professional agencies and multi-agency partnerships; and between the ‘efficiency’, accountability and ethics of policy reform. Enforcement versus prevention and regulation: The official preoccupation with prosecuting organised criminals, dismantling criminal organisations and seizing criminal assets is a form of supply-side criminology in which an understanding of ‘what works’ is limited to strategies of law enforcement, surveillance, mutual legal assistance and external border controls etc. Given this it is unsurprising that the overriding concern of official agencies is with the identification of the perpetrators of specific offences, since this is the sole basis on which evidence might be gathered towards successful enforcement. So, for example, even in the United States, where the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organisation (RICO) statutes criminalise membership of criminal organisations per se, prosecutors still have to prove the commission of some number of predicate offences. If, however, the focus is switched away from offenders, enforcement becomes less compelling as, to put it simply, it is difficult to prosecute a network, situational environment or social context. To this end a number of thinkers are becoming increasingly interested in the regulation of black (sic) and ‘grey’ markets so as to minimise their externalities, in particular the social damage they inflict (Taylor, 1999: 233-4). In these terms it is possible to identify a continuum of actual and potential interventions ranging from the enforcement to the regulation of interdependent licit and illicit markets. For example formal regulation is exercised over various dangerous products, such as tobacco, alcohol and petroleum that may be legally traded for a number of reasons; traders have to buy licenses, are subject to regulations, forms of inspection and goods sold are frequently subject to specific taxes. Failure to comply with regulations may ultimately lead to a loss of license. Of course, by definition, illegal traders cannot be formally licensed as such, but there are a variety of circumstances in which they may actually receive an informal ‘license’ to trade from local police or other regulators. Examples of this can be found among street traders, local drug dealers or fences, especially where those concerned act as informers for police. Of course,