Samenvatting

The central question of this article is how situational crime prevention (SCP) might be of help in preventing terrorism. Newman and Clarke's Policing Terrorism is confronted with investigations by the Dutch National Crime Squad, leading to the conclusion that Newman and Clarke have too narrow a scope on policing and preventing terrorism, in particular where it comes to the role of criminal investigation, which they narrow down to the phases immediately before and after a terrorist attack. Case files show that offender-oriented criminal investigation has a central role in the prevention of terrorism in several respects. First, criminal investigators intervene in earlier phases of terrorist preparation. Second, counter-terrorism targets a wide range of terrorist offences (e.g. terrorist financing and jihad travel) which often have no direct link to a terrorist assault plan. ‘Proactive repression’ seems an adequate term to characterise the preventive work of criminal investigators in this field. In turn, this work offers insights that might be of help in developing an SCP-approach to terrorism. Such an approach should start with recognizing that there is a diversity of terrorist offences and that each offence demands a crime specific script.