Samenvatting

Since 2007 the police and the public prosecution service in the Netherlands can apply special investigative powers in case of ‘indications’ of a terrorist offense. To investigate signs of terrorism, a suspicion is no longer needed. The underlying assumption behind this extension is that the ‘old’ legislation offers insufficient opportunities to investigate signs of terrorism in an early phase. In this article we examine this assumption about the action space of investigating officers. For the period 2007-2011, we examined how investigating officers responded to signs of terrorism in practice, what investigative powers they used, and how they – as street level bureaucrats – handled their discretionary authority. The research shows that police and judiciary officials are very well able to investigate signs of terrorism with the already existing powers, and that they have made little use of the new ‘indications’ criterion