According to a confidential report commissioned by the municipality and obtained by the Telegraaf newspaper, Amsterdam has lost the fight against organized crime.
After a six month investigation, professor of public administration Pieter Tops and investigative journalist Jan Tromp reported that authorities have little awareness of the size of the criminal market and poor operational capacity to intervene, especially with illegal drugs.
The two researchers gathered information from various agencies and concluded that nobody actually knows the size of the drug market. The Telegraaf claims that according to the researchers, the effects of massive illegal drug trafficking is disruptive to the city of Amsterdam but officials don’t have the resources to police the problem.
The municipality reportedly is not involved in projects aimed at preventing interdependence of the clandestine market with official ones and “information is almost never shared between competent authorities.” The knowledge available on cash flows and criminal networks is often lost between different police departments and therefore an investigation does not frame a criminal organization in its entirety.
Incidentally, this problem is not limited to Amsterdam. In all of the Netherlands, 6.7 billion euros of suspicious transactions are circulating and it is, in large part, money deriving from drug trafficking.
The full results of the investigation are scheduled to be presented on Friday.
