Crime in contemporary societies is increasingly complex, requiring police responses that operate across organizational, legal, and technological domains. This is particularly evident in the policing of gangs and organised crime, where effective responses depend on coordination, data integration, and adaptive strategies across agencies and jurisdictions. In the Swedish context, this logic of coordinated, evidence-informed action is also embodied in initiatives such as Sweden Against Organized Crime (SMOB), which seeks to strengthen cross-agency collaboration, shared knowledge production, and evaluation capacity in the fight against organised crime.

This session examines how criminological evaluation can guide and inform police responses to crime, with gangs and organised crime serving as particularly challenging and instructive cases. Rather than treating evaluation as a retrospective or primarily accountability-oriented exercise, the session conceptualizes evaluation as an integral component of strategy development, implementation, and continuous adaptation in policing. Criminological research contributes by translating empirical patterns into structured knowledge that can support decision-making at both operational and strategic levels.

The session addresses three core aspects. First, how evaluation frameworks can clarify the objectives and expected mechanisms of police interventions across different crime problems, enabling closer alignment between goals, methods, and outcomes. Second, how diverse evaluation approaches—ranging from experimental designs to mixed-methods and real-time analytics—can generate actionable knowledge about which strategies are effective in specific contexts and under what conditions. Third, how evaluation findings can be integrated into ongoing planning processes, supporting organizational learning, prioritization, and coordination within and between policing agencies.

By highlighting evaluation as a practical and forward-looking tool, the session positions criminological research as a central resource for more coherent, adaptive, and evidence-based police responses to crime over time.