In the past years important changes have occurred in police work in the Netherlands and Belgium. These developments, and new questions that arose because of these developments, are the reason we dedicate a special issue to ‘the police and citizen in a changing context’. In this introduction of this issue, we describe a number of developments and new questions. We address the changing distance between police officers and citizens, authority and trust, the role of citizens, technology and digitization and growing complexity and diversity. In addition, the articles in this special issue are introduced.

This special issue reflects about big data applications in policing. Terpstra and Salet (2020) refer to this development as ‘one of the greatest changes within the police about the past decade’ (p. 25). Beside attention to this topic in Dutch literature (e.g. Janssen et al., 2020; Spithoven & Beerends, 2019), the relevance of the subject is also internationally recognized (e.g. Brayne, 2021; Ferguson, 2017; Ridgeway, 2018). In this special issue, we examine – with a view to the past, present and future – how big data could be used in policing in the Netherlands and Belgium. This special issue is not about empirical big data applications, for that we would like to refer to specific studies (e.g., Rummens et al., 2021); in this issue we especially want to outline the breadth of this research area.

As drug producing countries and logistical hubs, the Netherlands and Belgium are topping the worldwide charts in the field of international drug trafficking. For this reason, the Netherlands – and to a lesser extent Belgium – is depicted as a ‘narco state’ in the media and the political arena. Another term that is frequently used when it comes to crime problems related to drugs is ‘subversive crime’. In this introduction of the special issue on drug crime, the authors elaborate on two themes that are central to the terms ‘narco state’ and ‘subversive crime’: the size and estimates of the drug economy and the embeddedness of the drug industry in the legal world in the Netherlands and Belgium.

In this introductory chapter we provide an overview of criminological research into intergenerational transmission of criminal behaviour that currently is, and has been, conducted both internationally and in the Netherlands. The most important findings of these studies are also discussed. Next, possible explanations are discussed for intergenerational transmission of crime in general, and more particularly for families that are involved in more serious and organized crime. Moreover, possible ways in which intergenerational transmission of crime can be prevented are discussed. Finally, we give some directions for future research on this topic and will introduce the contributions to this special issue.

In this introductory article we will discuss some of the recent developments in corporate crime research in the Netherlands and Belgium since 2008. In doing so, we will answer the following three questions: (1) What are the most important developments in the way research on corporate crime has been carried out? (2) What are key themes in corporate crime research? (3) What are the most important blind spots in research into corporate crime? We will conclude with some avenues for future research on corporate crime and its enforcement.